Episode 190: 432 Park Avenue (and other pencil towers)

Okay, I got the video recording going. I got my local going. This redcaster is now going. Aw, look at the dog. Also, hello. I'm going to do it as WAV to piss off Devin next time. Wait, did they not like WAV? I don't know. I just, I lived to an antagonized dev, so. Okay. Love you, Devin. I always sounded as WAV. I thought they told him to pass it on MP3, so I was doing it as WAV. Oh, yeah. It makes, honestly, I can say this, it makes no difference whatsoever. Nova, you look beautiful today. Thank you. Yeah, this is, I'm experimenting with actually bothering to do makeup. You look terrific. Or do eye makeup. Thank you. Roz, you look terrible. You have to because the screen is recording. That's right, yeah. All right, all right. Well, as long as we're doing that, hang on so that people can get a glimpse of my face. There I am. I just came from work. Hello? Now, show me the slides. Justin. Okay, I'm going to the slides. Faster, peasant boy. Here we are. Hold on. This is anti-Polish discrimination. He's also Norwegian. I'm Swedish. Norway barely even had any peasants because there's no arable land. Who would want to live in Norway? Roswood. Vikings. Vikings don't live in Norway. You go out and go in a boat and you go somewhere nicer. yeah like Minnesota it's half Norwegian half Somalia that's the beauty of America we do the sync point and then we launch the podcast we do the sync point yes going to do 3, 2, 1 mark and then you clap 3, 2, 1 mark ok good enough sorry boy every recording he hates to clap so Oh, that's unfortunate. But it's a very clap heavy podcast. Dog traumatized. By clap. Vogue left traumatizes innocent dog. Hello and welcome to Well, Where's Your Problem? It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am November Callie. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him. I'm the person talking right now. And Victoria, go, I guess. I don't know what to call you. Host? Fourth mic? I think fourth mic. Temporarily unemployed fourth mic. Yeah, welcome to the Well, There's Your Problem Make Work program. How does experience go, Victoria? Carrying on the mantle of FDR. My name is Victoria Scott. The person who's talking right now, my pronouns are she and her. And a guest. And we have a guest. One more guest. Hi, my name is Rob. My pronouns are he and him, and I will be your elevator attendant for this episode. Oh, you got, like, the handle as opposed to the buttons. It's always funny when you're in an elevator with an attendant and they just press the button for you. Oh, like at Phil's Games? Yeah. I just want a peaked cap. Like, this is all I want from life. The freight elevator in the BNY Mellon Center has a guy who just sits on a milk crate and he pushes the button for you. Give the man a chair at least. God damn. I do have a bomb shelter in the basement, so when it really goes wrong, the elevator attendant will be in unlimited positions of power. That's a good point, yeah. Anyway, this is going to be chaos because there are like five of us. Yeah. what you see on the screen in front of you is a very narrow skyscraper under construction i hate this thing i've been waiting to talk about it for a long yeah and knowing us it's going to fall down the day after we um we sort of do the episode or an unusually skillful 9-11 is going to take it out for it yeah just this is challenge mode 9-11 that's right A new game plus, you sort of get in and you're like, okay, now let's do a slightly harder one. To be fair, there's a whole like row of these things, we'll get into it. So like you could like pinball it, like just hit the first one right. Doing a kind of Takeshi's Castle of 9-11s down Billionaire's Road. Yeah, this is 432 Park Avenue. There's some strong arguments that it is not supposed to look like that. One of the worst buildings in America, if you ask me. It's not very good. It's poor. I'm on 432parkavenue.com. Well, I would be. Oh, fuck. I didn't pause my tour in Tullbott. That's going to give a moment for all of the right-leaning Yimby's to turn off the podcast right now. As we said, 432 Park is bad. They can suck my ass. This is a tower of abundance, if you will. Yeah, this is the middle finger to God, really. I have a question. If we have a painting for California housing policy, what do we have for New York City housing policy? That's later in the episode. Oh, perfect. Oh, thanks, dude. I appreciate you keeping that gag going. That was all Rob. Oh, well done, Rob. Yeah, Rob, you snuck. You're terrible. Ross, when you go home for Thanksgiving, never mind Wednesday Okay, thanks But before we talk about 432 Park Avenue And other pencil towers We have to do The goddamn news Oh fuck, that's me Obviously so much national news going on that it's incomprehensible, so we need to talk about extremely local news. The ongoing septa poly crisis has worsened. Poly crisis is a terrific one. Yeah. Yeah, we're going down to one form of public transportation, and knowing us, it would be buses. Burses, yeah. Well, Corinne will be thrilled. None of the rest of us will be, but at least Corinne will be thrilled. Big to 15 at the subway, goddammit. So the situation on the ground at this time, so SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, my local public transportation provider, has now lost the trolley tunnel as well as a good deal of regional rail capacity, as well as who knows what else is going on. apparently someone had the bright idea that to reduce wear on the overhead lines, to replace the contact shoes on the trolley poles of the trolleys. These are from, I want to say, an earlier order from a couple, from a decade ago, when we thought we were going to go in on an order of trolleys with Toronto. Was this supposed to be what happened with, like, Germantown, where they laid down track and had never used it, or is it something else? No, no, this is accurate. How do two grown North American cities not have trolleybus money between them? We have trolleybuses. Yeah. No, the trolleybuses are fine. It's the trolleys that are fucked. Oh, excuse me. Yeah. So, yeah, they replaced the overhead contact shoes with these bigger ones that were from Toronto with the idea that they would reduce wear. The problem is they're a little bit deeper than the older shoes. So when they went through the tunnel where the wire is much more highly tensioned, those contact shoes both wore down to nothing and then knocked off all of the insulators and, you know, the holders. And, you know, basically everything down there just got wrecked. The whole inside of the tunnel getting a perfect Chewinigan handshake. For sale, trolley shoes never worn. They use the Canadian inch is the problem. Yeah, exactly. My understanding, I forget if this was in the Inquirer article or not, was that some essentially load-bearing employee either left or was fired. It was basically the guy saying, no, don't use these contact shoes. I know we have a billion of them. They won't work. Load-bearing employee is going to stick with me for a long time. You know, once... They're called bottoms. Once they're all gone, someone's like, hey, let's use these and see what happens. Bad things, as it turns out. Stroke of someone who is not woke by training, but is woke by inclination, trying to refer to the concept of a gay employee. So, yeah, we're extra fucked. I don't know what else can go wrong. I'm sure plenty of stuff will. Just you wait there, bud. This morning, Governor Shapiro delivered a really big speech at the Fraser Yard saying that he had come up with $220 million to restore regular capital funding. But I don't know where he got that from. If he could just magically pull money out of his ass, he should have done that months ago. Right. Right. Just doing Eric Adams and, like, come back from Istanbul and be like, don't worry about it. It's fixed. Why do all the trolleys say Turkish Airlines on them now? Don't worry about it. It's fixed. There's an Armenian detector on the front of every phone. For, like, six months we had a Turkish Airlines wrapped streetcar in Seattle, and we were continually joking that it was Adams' signal that he was going to run for mayor of Seattle next time. Yeah. It's like we have, you know, restored funding to public transport, but we do have to refer to the Armenian genocide in quote marks now. It's fine. Don't worry about it. But, yeah, so this crisis is continuing to worsen, and I think things are going to get much worse before they get better. You know, I'm getting used to living entirely within like a five-block radius at this point. it's fine it's fine it's 15 minutes growth is happening yeah I've been forced into a 15 minute city mandatory 15 minutes in here Klaus Schwab is like successfully curtailing your freedoms God I just wish there were a store that had nice store directed PennDOT directed PennDOT to transfer money set aside for emergencies from the public transit trust fund to SEPTA just as long as there aren't any emergencies I guess this is an emergency Except that it's a constant emergency. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, things are bad here in southeast Pennsylvania. Could be worse. You ever tried being a math core violinist? Yeah, or in other news, have you ever tried flying an MD-11? Yeah, yeah. McDonnell Douglas keeping true to his corporate culture which is of course as we all know McDonnell Douglas civilian or military will kill you 100% lethality guaranteed we have the shirt buy the shirt we do we do I was just going to allude to the shirt because I wasn't necessarily going to promote the shirt over you know the dead bodies but sure fine it's fine it's fine step over the sort of mangled ruins of people and buy a shirt. Yeah, just poke the dead body with a stick. Get 10 million more followers. It's fine. You can help you process grief. New T-shirt. Yeah. Bury them in our shirts. Think of us like a true crime podcast. Calm down. Stay sexy and don't get socially murdered. Yeah. No, so UPS put an MD-11 on the ground, not in a good way. they perfectly 9-11'd a fuel storage facility in Louisville killing three of their own crew 11 people on the ground and you go, that's crazy how did this happen? Why do we have surveillance cam footage of a plane going in sideways? And the answer is because left engine fall off left engine fall off the plane on take off departing the aircraft usually not a good thing when parts fall off the airplane. Especially when you're on takeoff and so it's throttled up and so it just sort of spirals off and over the wing and then maybe kind of the sort of middle engine because it's a trijet just dies and then it augers into whatever this is. So yeah, there are close-up photos of the engine falling off. NTSB says that it had fatigue cracks on the engine connection which makes sense why it fell off there was actually a very similar DC-10 crash in 1979 due to, they had this weird bad maintenance procedure where to remove one of the engines you're supposed to use a crane to lift it off but I forget who it was, Republic I think worked out it was quicker and cheaper to just balance it on the end of a forklift what excellent and this like rocked the engine back and forth in such a way that it like overstressed the pylon and eventually the engine fall off if that's happened again then that's really bad because that means that the sort of like 40 year old sort of maintenance procedures are sort of coming back another load bearing employee there who was like do it that way this is why you need I don't care how cool you think a tri-jet is, and neither does the FAA because they have grounded all MD-11s, also DC-10s, if anyone's still flying those. DC-10s? All right. Yeah. Cool. My question is, if your package was on that flight, what do they put on the tracking update? Plane press. Yeah. Unexpected item, your package. Somehow. Your unexpected item in the bagging area. Your package has left our storage facility. It's really left our storage facility. Your package has consciously uncoupled from, you know, its transport means. Well, the thing is, one of the things that clips... We can de-clips your package. One of the things that clips on the way in was UPS's own warehouse. So it was entirely possible that the tracker would show that it had left the storage facility and then, I guess, come back briefly. so once again that is the kind of precision aiming you will need for like the main topic so once again UPS exploring new frontiers in the most expensive and deadly way to not deliver a package on time and usually that's the the film that'll eventually be made about this will of course be entitled return to sender um god damn it broad I already made a joke about wearing a McDonald's shirt to a funeral, which I guess is insane. I mean, this trijet shit, it's literally just like they're cheap and they're old and the only people still flying them are cargo airlines, UPS and FedEx. And part of the reason why is because UPS and FedEx don't care about their employees. and so I am also personally bummed because they do fly them into not even SeaTac but the Boeing field which is even closer and lower to the city of Seattle so you can get like, it's like the 80s I feel like I'm in the opening of The Sopranos you get trijets, FedEx trijets landing right over the freeway, it's so cool I wouldn't recommend that we keep killing people to ensure that my Sopranos vibe is maintained, but still. I mean, if they blast the music on the freeway while you're driving to work or something, that'd be good. It's got a tech, a fourth engine on there, you know, for redundancy. The quadruple. Redundancy? Yeah, for redundancy. For the redundancy. Yeah, so there's extra of them. In case there's a problem with one, the other one, yeah. It's redundancy. Yeah. Well, you know, all we can say is I guess we'll wait for the NTSB report to come out. You know, we don't know what happened specifically yet, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, this happened during the shutdown, which I don't think I'm going to talk about. Yeah. And I just think about being on the NTSB, like, go team and having to do this unpaid, like, unpaid labor to be like, let me just move the chunky Maranara that used to be a person out of the way. human being soup, right? Retrieve the sort of like recorder with their sort of last screams on it. Great. Fantastic. Probably got to pay your own airfare to get out of there. Oh, god damn. Yeah, I mean, your package arrives four months late and like the cardboard is still a bit sulky and it's just a bit horrible in the end. Oh no, my buy snooze.com. Which won't ship the United States anymore by the way. It's fine, but why is all of my snooze red? And why does it taste like pennies? normally does anyway i don't care god where are you getting this well not vice news.com anymore because they're up to the united states now that was the goddamn news something is harassing an end now for announcements announcements announcements announcements announcements announcement um we have my previous threats were insufficient the threats will intensify come to the live shows i don't know i'm gonna find a way i'm gonna escalate from threatening to kill them to threatening to torture them you know are you attached to your kneecaps would you like to stay that way it's a really really elaborate like you know just like torture camp system maybe it's a fetish thing who knows it's not my problem i i don't this is gonna like The history books are not going to look kindly on this. That's fine. They don't know what time it was anyway. I think I'll be remembered in the context of my time, and the context of that time was not selling enough tickets to live shows. Yes. So anyway, we have two upcoming live shows at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia, which I understand is now called Union Transfer. I like that you're going to get there at Loaded and be like, what happened to the spaghetti? Name it every time. we're there with the Quarators podcast about questions from Quora the worst website on the internet yes it's the 14th and 15th of December right yes sir I had a nightmare about it this morning where it was tomorrow and I hadn't written the slides yet that's fine we could get up there and read the phone book but we won't we'll put in a lot of effort and because of that effort and because of the fact that I'm going to torture you if you don't, you should come to the live shows. Yes. That's a previous incentive for some of them. If that makes you feel strange, I'm not going to torture you unless you come to the live shows. We will be doing the beat and greet. Every fan gets punched square in the nose, and then we sign something, if you want. Do you have my various Patreon tiers? Because you could go from one punch to severe mauling for the higher We do. We do. I am pleased to announce that we have upgraded the forgery of November's signature. We're now going to rubber stamp November's signature so we don't have to write it anymore. You actually got it. Yes. Fantastic. Yeah, I have it. I was wondering why you wanted me to send you, like, a PDF with a really clear scan of my signature and my credit card details and my fingerprints. Well, it was kind of tricky. Yeah. I have a question. Yeah. Cool. But, yeah, come to the live shows. Roz won't be willing to beat you with a hammer because he abhors violence, but I sure don't. So, yeah. You do the opposite of – whatever the opposite of abhorring is is what you do about violence. Abhorring? Yeah, you abhor violence. Yeah. Video instantly requires content. It requires, like, ID to watch. No. Let me get this straight. Yeah, bud. We're threatening to beat people up if they don't come to the show. Yep. But also if they do come to the show. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Makes sense to me. Yep. Okay. The other one just like happens to you. It's sort of like a French army in like late 1916 disciplinary policy. And I think that'll work out for us about as well. Yeah. Well, there's your problem. Come to our live show and we'll kill you. You will be issued with a set of Horizon Blue sort of gray coats and then beaten to d***. Yeah, well, there's your problem. The only podcast with Corvée labor. It's great. Those were the announcements. Wait, no, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. No, they weren't. What was the other part of the announcement? The other part of the announcement was the press one. Oh, the press part. Yeah. No, that was... Oh, yes, the press one. Please write nice articles about us. The only ones we have are a hyper allergic article for like 2021. Part of getting November over the United States eventually, and I mean eventually being like, I don't know, 2028 after Trump's third term is, you know, the O-1 visa process is really fucked up and complicated, and it does require there to be a lot of press about us. so if you work for a newspaper of some kind please write an article about us does not have to be positive does not have to be positive it could be really mean I don't know how to read the other thing that I was going to say get us in the post-millennial don't speak in media can you just like get what is it, Times of India that thing that just reproduces everybody else's content oh good question I don't know. Indian tour. Here we go. Yeah. Ooh. I want to, we're going to do the whole tour on a commuter train with no doors. Yes. Led by Jay Sate. Yeah. But the announcement I was going to make was the wish lists are live. I will link to them in the description. These are for the seniors that I work with at Lutheran Settlement House. They are for the kids who need toys and Christmas donations. if our compulsion to bring you to the live shows doesn't work if you don't donate to the children you will be mauled in some sort of hyper efficient way. I'm good at mauling. But also it's the dreams of children. You should need mauling to display I want to say that my favorite thing at work is when we get enough toys usually that we have surplus however they are stored in the furthest corner of the creepy wet basement So I always have to go, I have to, like, make the sign of the cross and load myself in to go in the furthest corner of the creepy basement. And I'm just like, and I pop out like Santa Claus. I'm just like, here's toys! I'm just fake, screaming at me. Just for clarity's sake, the toys are in the basement, or the children, which are you keeping these? The children are upstairs. Oh, and I will be, I have authorized my wife to spend the company money on a custom-made Santa suit, so look forward to that expense on our taxes. All right, that was the end of the announcements. Those were the announcements. All right. All right, this is mostly a Rob episode. Hi, Rob. Let's go. Yeah. So, as usual, I have, you know, my engineering qualifications through my master's degree in English literature, so if I fuck up, then it's not my fault. I can provide help where needed so basically why are we talking about this essentially it is to make fun of some of the worst people in the world watch them make each other miserable watch them sue each other because they decide to build a fucking terrible building and then sell condos inside it for many many millions of dollars the condos all look hideous we'll get to it and this is one of those ones where apart from maybe some construction guys here and there, you don't have to feel sorry for anybody, because they all, you know, everybody involved is a piece of shit, so it's really fun. Here's a small quote from the New York Times. I was convinced it would be the best building in the world, said Serena Abramovich, one of the earliest residents of 432 Park. She, by the way, is married to an oil and gas raccoon, so fuck her too. They are still billing it as God's gift to the world, and it's not. She and her husband bought a 3,500-foot apartment for almost $17 million as a second home. Fuck you. Die. Fuck you. That's about the size of a good-size West Philly twin, sort of one of the big mansion-type houses. Yeah. We could have the podcast castle. We could have six of the podcast castles. Oh, yeah. How many dank basements could that afford you? One. Just one. Yeah. And just, yeah, as a small credit where it's due, I started reading about this or researching this because of a long read in the New York Times from October of this year, written by Dion Searcy, Stephanos Chen, and Uvashi Ubaroi. I hope I pronounced that right. Credit where credit's due. New York Times, mostly terrible, but sometimes they do really good work. Yeah, I also read this same article. And, yeah, I read it and I was like, this is for us. This is perfect. The story was fantastic, except that segue where they started blaming trans swimmers for why it was built for me. Well, yeah, they should have come in first place. Yeah, I could not work out whether or not the private pool had like a, you know, had like a weird policy. But, you know, maybe one day we'll get there. I'm downloading the penthouse for sure now. Oh, I'm going to c*** everybody in this building with my bare hands, man. You're not going to need to. I thought it would be a good idea to go over some basic skyscraper design here. Yes. Fantastic. We have the best graphics in the game. I don't care. High production values. I mean, like... The one article that Hyperallergic wrote about us that I was mentioning says, like, in the second paragraph, this is nothing intricately produced, like 99% or anything from NPR. It's like, I forget what they call us, but it's like aggressively DIY and relaxed. As you all know, I was just recently in Europe for a while, and I got to see the Trash Future offices, right? Hell yeah. Got to record an episode with Gareth of Britnology. You know, we talked about U.S. versus U.K. railways and sort of the general vibe. That's over on the Trash Future Patreon. You got to be on the special high tier to listen to it, though. Can you send that to me? No. No, give me $10. Give me $10, you cheap fucking bastard. So anyway, I was in the offices and I got jealous. So I went into the Patreon and took out a big bunch of money. Long story short, this is our new global headquarters building. Where is it? Are you going to tell us where it is? This is going to go up in Center City sometime fairly soon. Oh, no, yeah, I approved this, actually. I was wondering where the big – Yeah, this is just a schematic. The actual building will look nicer. Anyway. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. You're never going to get it yet. It says W-Y-T-P. No, you're supposed to read it from left to right. That's not yours. That's not my problem. Don't inside. well you're their problem look I uh I have in all seriousness looked into getting us off the space for me and Ross to record uh just like in the shittiest place imaginable like above bars and stuff and I got so far as to sending an email and I got just a flat we are not interested thank you yeah it's crazy like owning a podcast studio or renting a podcast studio is a ridiculous expense do not draw any inferences about Trash Eater from them. Well, no, but the thing is that once we approve these schematics, which we did, by a vote of two to didn't vote. Yeah. One of you has a stamp with my signature on it. Let's do it, baby. So anyway, this is about 70 stories tall, right? We got about 2 million leaseable square feet. I think we only need a floor or two of this. So I'm pretty sure that with, you know, Center City office space going at a premium as it is right now, we're going to make that money back no problem. Yeah, it's like us, us, and Reese and Horowitz for five floors. You're the first podcast to invent, you know, real estate scams. That's never been done before. Look, it's not a scam. I lease office space out to people who want office space. That's whole business. This is landlordism. Have you ever considered writing one of those books that's like the 10 tips of successful business minds or something? I feel like you're on to something here. Sell things that people want to buy. What they don't teach you in Drexel University. Well, they don't teach you in Drexel University and it's Ross fistfighting a guy from Anderson Horowitz in a parking lot. So, anyway, I feel like this is a good place to go over some skyscraper systems some ideas behind their design so on and so forth why they are the way they are right um obviously we did a whole bonus episode about this a while back um i'm just going to do it again here but shorter for convenience yeah um or just go back and listen to the old one just pause this and like why don't you do your own homework fuck me yeah exactly so you know okay you need some kind of frame that holds the building up you know that's usually just a grid of columns and floors and crap like that. That can be done in steel. It can be done in concrete here in the United States, at least. Usually office space is in steel. Usually residential is in concrete. This has something to do with the fact that the floors are closer together in residential buildings. So for whatever reason, it makes more sense to do it in concrete. I don't know the specifics there. You can also sometimes mix it up. So like the FMC tower near 30th Street Station, that has office space on the lower floors and residential on the upper floors. So the bottom is this light, airy steel frame, and then on top of it, it's reinforced concrete. Looked goofy as all hell when it was going up. I wish I had a picture. I think I might have one if you want me to send it to you. when you when we approved this and now that we're building a skyscraper WTYP and friend skyscraper building company no never mind joke's gone sorry folks no we still have the plane too don't worry oh no that was what I was yeah I wanted to make sure you hadn't sold the plane that definitely isn't stolen and definitely wasn't involved what have I been signing so here's the thing right we have a rubber stand and I enlisted into the coast guard We have a literal rubber stamp of your signature. Our power is limitless. First of all, how dare you enlist me? I was holding out for a commission. Why did you sign for all those UPS packages? Is that what I want to know? November is shipping me by snooze.com by the truckload. I think that's a grantor for your mortgage. Why do these keep saying you fucking bastard on them? Below the tower, there's... Below the tower, there's going to be some kind of foundation. This might be steel piles you drive in with a pile driver. These might be concrete caissons where you get a big auger and you drill a hole in the ground that's like six or seven feet in diameter, sometimes more. And you throw in some reinforced steel caging. You fill the whole thing with concrete, right? They might be a shallow floating foundation, depending on where you are. Sometimes that's sufficient. Can you explain what you mean by shallow floating foundation? So a floating foundation is just a big concrete pad, and it sort of floats in the soil. Okay. Good enough. Thank you. Right. So that's going to be, you know, because there's stuff with, like, buoyancy in here, which I didn't do good in foundation design in school. I'm going to be honest. That was never my forte. Yeah, but you have the degree, baby. That's true. so you know anyway you've designed this foundation in such a way you don't have like excessive settling and it's strong enough to bear the weight of the building send it either into the soil or into the bedrock or you know whatever you need to do right there's lots of loads that act on the building right away through the earth to a parallel counterweight building on the other side oh that's where the mole people live yeah yeah we have a 70 story tall mole people wtyp headquarters sticking out of the antipody of Philadelphia. Yes. What is the antipody of Philadelphia? Oh, this would be funny. It's a spot in the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia, says the AI Overview. That sounds that way. That's where the Mystic plane is. Which one? The MH-77? Which one was the one that they never found? Yeah, it's on top of the helipad. Yeah. Please don't disrespect our MOL people. Our counterparts. Thank you. uh so i'm on the website for schuylkill yards to look at fmc tower and the heading just says this is a building yeah you're not wrong checks you know exactly what it is you know that'd be good subject for the building show um anyway so several loads act on this building right on the frame you have live loads right those people walking around that's furniture that's you know um papers that's computers that's all that crap stuff you can move around yeah grotesquely heavy bicycle etc etc there's the dead load which is the weight of the structure itself you know the steel beams the floors the uh even some of the some of the more uh the fixtures you're not going to move around you know carpets you know uh i don't know hvac systems you know pipes you know so on and so forth right um then you have stuff that's more variable you have like wind loads that they act on the building sideways right you have snow loads that acts on the building vertically um you have rain loads that's a little bit less important usually that's less than the snow load and of course you have earthquake loads getting my sort of droplets of osmium rain yeah you got earthquake loads those are pretty hard to deal with a lot of the times They tend to be the governing code pretty much everywhere now because at some point we acknowledged that the New Madrid earthquake occurred, and maybe we should plan for this stuff even if you're in, like, New York City. So, you know, I'm not going to go into, like, load combinations right now. It's not important, but either you build the thing very heavy to withstand all these loads, maybe you find a clever way around them, right? So one example, for the sake of comfort, you want to avoid excessive sway in the building from wind loads, right? It's normal for a skyscraper to sway somewhat in the wind, even like a foot off center. But you don't want to go really far because that gets uncomfortable. So you might put a big-ass weight at the top of the building, right, and you put it on hydraulic rams. and then when there's wind, you sort of move it to the opposite side of the building, and then when the building starts to sway in that direction, you move it back, and you keep moving it counter-cyclically in order to reduce the sway of the building. This is a tuned mass stamper. This is also a spoiler. Yeah. This is getting more and more common in new buildings. There's also passive designs. So like the Comcast Center in Center City, Philadelphia, they had a passive mass stamper, which is just a giant tank of water. This is a big pool, yeah. Yeah, which is sloshed around. But it leaked so bad they had to drain it, and they found out they didn't really need it anyway. So that just sits there now. Now, other than our fundamental structural systems, right, there's other things going on. You have a facade, right? You know, if you're fancy, you call that a building envelope system, right? That's the thing that, you know, keeps people protected from weather. It protects them from falling out of the building, right? You know, all that good stuff. You have your big plumbing systems because you have to pump all the water to the top of the building because municipal water doesn't have that kind of pressure, right? You have big, beefy sewage systems. You have heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, also pretty beefy. Usually it's centralized, so, you know, the ducting work is a big nightmare. All these, like, huge HVAC systems have to do all kinds of weird things to maintain, like, multiple zones. And so it's more of an art than a science, big HVAC, which is kind of weird. You've got big electrical systems. A lot of times these buildings contain their own transformers. They take in, like, full mains power or at least, like, medium voltage, and medium voltage here is like, you know, 13 kilovolts or whatever that is. You know, stuff that if you touch it wrong, it vaporizes you. You know, you have trash chutes, you have mail chutes, you have stuff like that, right? You may have like a glycol system if there's like servers in there or something. There's lots of different building systems, right? Now, the size and shape of the building, they may be governed by local zoning laws or ordinances, right? So if you have, like, this is sort of the classic Art Deco, you know, wedding cake step back. That was from, like, most pre-war skyscrapers in New York City were built that way because there was a law that said you needed to step back the building at certain height in order to allow for natural light and air at the street level, right? Yeah, I like that you've reproduced that at WTYP Towers. I like that you're going for the retro look. We haven't gotten this through the value engineers yet. That's the problem. And we're not gonna. Well, apparently I've already signed off on this, though. Yeah, exactly. Well, we thank you for your contribution. And a lot of those older pre-war buildings had small floor plates. That's what I mean by a floor plate. That's sort of like the cross-sectional area of the building. So that was due to the need for natural ventilation. They did not have air conditioning. Once air conditioning was invented, then you could suddenly start building big, fat buildings with huge amounts of office space on each floor where you could stand in the center and you couldn't see the windows anywhere. You know, so, yeah, this is one way that the size of the building is governed is by local laws and whether you have air conditioning. But all the stuff I just mentioned pales in comparison to the real limiting factor on building size, which is vertical circulation, right? Which is to say elevators. Elevators. Elevators. It's all elevators. Ignore everything I just said. The only thing that matters is elevators. Thank you. So. Hi, Glenn. Hi, Glenn. The taller your building is, the longer it takes for the elevator to get to the top of it. Right? Sure. the taller your building is presumably the more square feet it holds meaning there's more people in it who all need more elevators to get around the like rocket fuel payload thing the tyranny of the elevator equation yes yes yeah konstantin sholkowski launching a bunch of people to the top of a really tall tower. Yeah. We haven't yet built an elevator that can share an elevator shaft with another elevator, so each new elevator... Because the OSIS Corporation refuses to innovate in the previous 125 years. I think ThyssenKrupp had a prototype, but... Every advancement in elevator systems has been about you not dying. What if I want to die? What if I think... What if I'm the Gus Grissom of elevators. And I think that dying in an elevator accident is worth the risk of conquering the elevator shaft. Why don't you just do two... It's called a pattern oster. Why don't you just do two on a counterbalance and just run it through a carabiner on the top and then just straight up and down. Just fucking trebuchet me out of that. It's called a pattern oster. They like it in the Czech Republic, but they go very slow. just crank that shit faster I don't well they have to move continuously and you have to figure out how to jump on and off that's the problem yeah just half of Central Park filled with like trebuchets and catapults getting into the office and out every day is going like the film Cube I'm the Cube from the film Cube was that the Cube from the film Cube? wow the practical result of this is for a given site there's some practical upper limit to the height of a building or at least its occupancy because otherwise the building would be entirely elevators your sort of like mile high frank lloyd wright concept building does not work unless you have some kind of like veto aircraft with a lot of landing pads oh love a job chat love a harrier Floyd Wright, when he designed the Illinois, he did acknowledge that there were probably not enough elevators. But he said by the time this building were able to be constructed, this would be solved using atomic-powered elevators. All right, man. Yes. Hell yeah. Why not? Yes. Elevators too cheap to meter, I say, as I led to the stratosphere. We still don't have the atomic elevator that solves this problem, but we have some ways to mitigate it. Frank Lloyd Wright visionarily predicting the Fallout series of games. So you can have things like I have an express elevator, right? So I'm at the lobby. I want to go to the floor up here. There's an elevator that goes halfway up. It makes all the local stops. and then there's another elevator that goes all the way up here before it starts making stops, right? That's an express elevator. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is with sky lobbies, right? So I have – hold on. I'm at the lobby, right? Once again, I want to go to a floor up here. Well, the elevators here only go – ah, crap. I moved the mouse too much. god damn it yeah i can see why they said our production values were diy some amount but there's a second elevator it goes all the way to the top but it only makes two stops right and those are at sky lobbies right at the sky lobby you can catch a local elevator that brings you to your floor right that's another option that sort of takes some of the the load off the elevators at the bottom it also means you can stack these elevator shafts on top of each other, right? You can also do things like have double-decker elevators. That's usually combined with a sky lobby. So, you know, if there's an elevator that's going to be very highly used, you can make a double-deck elevator. You can do fancy dispatching systems where rather than you being in the elevator hall and you push a button that says up. Instead, you enter your floor and then the computer does beep, boop, bop and figures out the most efficient way to dispatch all the elevators to get as many people to where they need to go as quickly as possible. Pan Medicine does this. Yeah. I don't like it. But it's more efficient. But it's marginally more efficient is the thing. This is not like a total revolution in elevator technology, right? Ultimately, when you have a big building with a lot of people who need to move around, you just need a lot of elevators. And if you're in a building that's been underspecked, like Liam, you may remember this, the Times Square Holiday Inn. One elevator. One of them. One elevator. For 26 floors. With eight hotel rooms on each floor. Fuck y'all. Give me my money back. congratulations on getting the furry convention experience, Liam. They did have warnings on each floor saying elevator wait time can be up to 15 minutes. And they weren't lying, to their credit. So, yeah, the big thing about buildings that constrains their size and shape is elevators. It's all elevators. Everything else, who cares? Just elevators. Anyway, that's what I had to say. Has anyone ever considered putting a big fireman's pole so that the elevators only have to go up and they can just slide down? I just need some really nice gloves. Yeah, I heard about the school where they had elevators that only went up and elevators that only went down. Are you talking about sideways? I don't want elevators that go down. I just want the pole. Are you talking about sideways stories from Wayside School? Yes. That book is an absolute banger. Yeah. The elevators work perfectly once. We've taken an elevator the word perfectly once. We were in New York, a city that hates us. Oh, yeah. Where I was growing up, there's, like, an amusement park with a swimming pool inside, and it has, like, all the fancy slides. But it has one that's, like, it has two slides that are almost vertical. Like, they're just off vertical, and they're only for, like, you know, you have to be 12 or older to ride or something. And I remember them because, like, the really steep one, several times, you just completely let go of the water, and you just fall through empty space until you hit the water again. Do that. That's how you can use that swimming pool that's empty in the building in Philly. Their mass damper that leaked. Just have people just cannonball directly into it. See, dual-purpose mass damper. You put the corpses of multi-millionaires in there, weighs a bit more, gets a bit more stable, don't see a problem. You've got to wait for them to decompose so they slosh around. Just take it forever. Just like, come on! anyway so yeah um skyscraper does it's mostly elevators it's just elevators anyway anyway before we start talking about the building itself i thought we have to explain a little bit what why we are and what we're doing here so this is the view from central park looking south and this is what's known as billionaires row now oh yeah it's terrible it's just a bunch of middle fingers to working people. It is just like, if you want like a highest concentration of where the worst people in the world live, it's this and Dubai. Like that's kind of, you know, I'm not saying you could do some surgical strikes, but I'm saying they would be... I'm limited genocide on billionaires, Ro. I'm just saying to the IDF that maybe I've identified three Hamas command centers. I believe you have, November. Yes So specifically the big five needle towers you see before you on the screen those are the main five There are others There are I think a few more being constructed And this is either where the worst people on earth live or you know more commonly it is where they speculate even more on their apartment being worth forever and forever more in the future because you know that what you do with very expensive real estate It's centered around West 57th Street, like I say, near the southern edge of Central Park. Why is it the southern edge? It's because it has the best views and also because it catches the most sunlight. So if you face the park, you have southern exposure, you know, and you can either – I don't think it's really good for wine growing because there's no slope angle, but, you know, like you have the south-facing side. And in November of 2025, just to give you a little bit of context, It's the top floor penthouse, which is 11,500 square feet or 1,070 square meters if you live in a real country. Who won the war? I think that – The Soviets? Don't worry about that. And I think it went on to be sold for about like $100 million in the end. Jesus. That was a discount, though. first time it sold when the tower was just completed for $165 million. So, you know, your asset may depreciate in value as well. I feel so bad for whoever's asset depreciated in value. Well, you know, wait until you get a look at what, you know, that money buys you. Next slide, please. Wow. This is what you get for $100 and some odd million. It's a room. I think this is – it's a big room. It's a room. yeah it's the hotel lobby in the sky yeah you could you could sit down I do like that there's like openable windows you could crack open you know get a 47 mile an hour breeze that's pretty pleasant every German listening to this just sat forward in their chair like okay he's probably only open like a crack is the thing Yeah, probably. It's like a rifle shot. Yeah. Just getting birdstripped by opening the window. Just like fucking getting lost by seagull. You could look out of the window. You could look at some of the little objects. It's got a lot of objects. This is my large white carpet where I display my white furniture I never use, which the developer assured me was very expensive, but he actually got it from crate and barrel. Yeah, good luck getting anything up or down from there. Also, you're exposed on three if not four sides, so then you have the problem of like, okay, you can sort of be in there, but what happens when someone flies a drone up to your window, which they will all the time? Yeah, the way it's done over is you can't just shotgun blast the thing back to hell. Well, you could shotgun blast the thing. You just spend a lot of money on windows. Just once, right? I don't know, you can do it any number of times, but, you know, the window... I got a window guy on speed dial. Putting, like, foil over all the windows like a crack house. Who's the insane... Just get some plywood in there, just like... I got hollered and hollered on speed dial. Coincidentally, does anyone have a good window guy? I mean, I suppose the one thing you could do all the way up there in, you know, your multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar penthouse is, you know, much like a very other tall tower is you could feel closer to God. And God really likes it when you come closer to him, as we'll see during the presentation. Of course. That's why everyone in this tower speaks the same language. I guess the other thing is, if you're in here, this is sky prison, right? Because not only are you sort of, like, up this high that you're fucking, like, you know, swaying around, you can't open any of the windows, but also if you're like I feel like I want to go for a walk in Central Park which is after all basically on my doorstep. It's very nice. You know I want to do the Kurt Vonnegut thing and go and buy an envelope or whatever. Oh sure that'll be like half an hour until I can get to the ground. I didn't check that up at the time but it'll be something along the lines. This is I think the 80th floor maybe it's something like that. It's 80 or 86th floor. there's some floor plans later on my understanding is this building uh if this no this is not 432 park i believe 432 park has two or three elevators no it has four when there's there's only a hundred apartments okay fine you know but what yeah there's only a hundred apartments well we'll get into how many apartments there are i need to know the nouveau riche but that's still too many apartments. I'm taking the opposite angle on this. This is too much. You want to hear some real girl asking? When I looked at this image, my first thought was, where do you put the big TV? Yeah. Where do you put the bayonet? Because you can show me this view, and I'm like, cool. How do I watch movies? Yeah. Yeah. And also, like, with that much window space all the time, you'll just have sun, like, hitting your screen. Oh, the glass. The glass. Yeah, it's Samsung anti-glare TV. I can't game under these conditions. Yeah, I have the aluminum foil over the windows like a crack house, but that's just so the glare doesn't bother me when I'm like, I'm a strike. Selling one of these to the world's richest trans woman, and she has done this in order to, like, put one gaming chair. There's one floor that keeps color-shift LED lighting at night. There's like the cheapest possible dog cage in one corner. She's got a steam deck. And some RGB life. She's got an RGB life. And some RGB life. Shut the fuck up. Some Fortnite clan really regretting their investment that they're not going to longer game. Listen, she's gaming like an angel. but to get to, like, you have to walk across that carpet, which is, like, crunched in Cheeto dust. Do you imagine the ping is good up there because, like, you're just running more cable, like, you know. It's literally, it's like hardwood at this point, you know, but... Anyway, next slide, please. So the other question, of course, is why is this particular part of the world so stupidly expensive? Well, the first is it has literal proximity. My people are a vile tribe, I readily admit. You know, like, it's why I no longer live there. I haven't done for 15-plus years. I now live in Switzerland. It's all normal. I'm not happy. So, no, it's literally its proximity to Wall Street and the offices of hedge funds, you know, various new money cunts. This is not where old money lives, by the way. This is where new money lives. Old money already has the nice apartment blocks that are directly on the park. This is where the new money lives. You still have the kind of verticality problem where it's like if your office is two blocks over, the fastest way there is to rig up some kind of a zip line. Well, I couldn't find it because it's literally not available online. But when they started marketing the apartments for this, not that you, I think, need to, but they still did. they um did like a five minute movie with the guy i forgot his name is it philippe petite the high wire guys yeah and he did a high wire walk to this building and it was filmed and like essentially the the promo film as i understand it had no bearing to what you were actually buying it was just like a series of arty shots so i think technically you could high wire to your penthouse office in morgan stanley or wherever i want to see them try it that should be conditional for living there. It would make you less to have design elements. Like a Tyrolean Traverse, but like with the wind speeds up there, if you didn't get it right, you would just whirl around on it instead of landing. Yeah, I want to see it. Let's fucking go. Can I take a bird strike in the middle of my commute? Yes. Anyway, Central Park has historically been an area of extraordinary wealth. It was like that. The founder builds, the Morgans, they built all the other fancy apartments on specifically the southern side. Some of the people who live here are either in Park 432 or other similar buildings include Bill Ackman, Michael Dell, Ken Griffin, Lloyd Blankfein, some Chinese billionaires, some Russian billionaires, just, you know, your favorite people all live there. And they're also, crucially, these are all money storage facilities. They're all bought on the assumption that they will increase in value or stay in value and also the apartments are protected by US law. They are protected by a purchase price in the still reserve currency of the world. We'll see how long that lasts. And you also have a bolt hole in case... When did this podcast get released again? Bill Ackman's sort of very very long 4am tweets make more sense when i consider that he might be having to sleep like sort of half a mile into the sky yeah yeah and i mean i i usually in most circumstances i tend to push back on the all these new apartments are vacant narrative for most buildings but for these sorts of buildings yeah no this is an investment vehicle first um they're also all Like, not to be sort of trad and based here, they're all ugly as sin. That middle one, I believe, is 111 57th, which is the one that I was reading about before we recorded, because I got really fascinated by it because the developer's main goal with it was to be the tallest non-union built skyscraper in the city of New York. Fuck my life. and they ended up actually like getting criminally charged with screwing over all their employees on like overtime wages and not contributing to like new york's like workman's comp fund and they were all really guilty of it but none of them went to prison and they finished the building um i i believe currently the most expensive one of these buildings again that's not in in park 432 but in another one belongs to Ken Griffin of Citadel Security and arch-nemesis of the GameStop freaks. He bought it for $238 million, I think, a couple years ago. That's like the top end. That's just bragging rights. At that point, you're just doing savage, simple bullshit. Like, this is not. Yeah, I mean, just based on the images of this and also all of the livability complaints, you can buy an incredibly nice turn-of-the-century, like 9,000 square foot house in Seattle for like $2 million. I don't know what it is in New York. I don't know. You can get it. I don't know there, but like why? I don't know. Whatever. Yeah, I mean, you can rent a small apartment around here for that money. It's great. If you wanted to spend that kind of money on an actual decent apartment, you could get it in some of the nice big pre-war apartment buildings that, you know, they have a huge rambling floor plan and so on and so forth. They go for several tens of millions of dollars in these older buildings. Fun fact, you can also buy that in Chicago for $110,000. I think for this money, you could probably buy the other half of Detroit and then start a rival police force to match that other freak who keeps buying private police forces there. You could do the Warriors 2025 edition is what I'm saying. I've created Windsor 2. anyway next slide please so these buildings are all quite new this is from September 2007 and as you can see not to be an asshole but I do not believe this image is from 2007 it was according to the caption on the website I see something here I was listening politely and I was like yeah sure I'll believe that, absolutely. I said I would never do that. With a time machine. I said I would never do that, but I forgot. No, no, no, but it's whatever. I might have been slightly off, but my general point stands, these towers are all quite new. They were all built in the 2010s, essentially. Why were they built like that? That swiftly moved on from the thing that didn't happen. So, Billionaires Row and, like, the other needle towers in Manhattan were all built in the 2010s, like I was saying. But many of them are not quite as valuable as, like, the record prices for construction for the apartments as then achieved. What turns out to be really, really difficult is – Oh, has there been some kind of downturn in the economy? This is post the big downturn. This is 2010s. So, like, the hard thing is resale. So, like, the first person to buy it buys it for various reasons, as we discussed before. The second person to buy it, they might want to live in it, and they don't like it as much. But essentially what you're looking at here is one of the results of the post-2008 recession. And what was happening in New York at the time is because most real estate had collapsed, and there was so much, like, stimulus and other money still, like, floating around looking for returns. And the bet was that a couple of these super expensive towers would attract like the only people left with real money in real estate, which is people with ultra high net worth with disposable cash who still want super fancy apartments or want an investment for later. So that's why Park 432 and the other towers were built in this time at that time, because it was a bet that the real estate market in Manhattan was still functioning for people, for billionaires and for people for whom the 2008 recession fundamentally didn't matter to their bank account. Like not really, not really. essentially. And so between 2009 and 2020, about 22,000 odd new units, new condos or whatever were built in Manhattan across 530 new buildings. So about 44 apartments per new build. So they're all quite closely cramped together. And a lot of those were very, very expensive because they were specifically targeted at the ultra wealthy. The problem is though, very wealthy people don't need a $20 or $30 million condo. They already have five houses. They probably already have an apartment in New York, so it's just a toy. And the people who buy these condos at the price premium of a new build versus a resale can be very high. Like the new build, the first sale is super, super high. The resale is much lower. According to the New York Times, the developers would try to ask for about 118% more for a first sale than for a resale. because they have to get their money out. So Park 432 cost like a billion, give or take, to construct. They got $3 billion back in the end, but the first sale was super important for all the developers to get their money out, also in case things go wrong, as we'll talk about in a bit. And this also means that a lot of demand, or a lot of these apartments stay vacant. According to the New York Times, this is 2020, so it's a bit older, but there were about 7,000 condos available for sale in New York. So that represents about six years' worth of inventory for Manhattan, and a normal market clears through its full inventory in two to three years. So what you're looking at is like an empty or an unsold housing stock that's sitting there twice as long than a normal market would bear. But because it's Manhattan and because it's so expensive, normal humans do not buy these. So these things just sit there being empty. And I'm sure that... You know what you got to do, man. Yeah. Come on. It's time to go, buddy. Well, for reasons... A thousand dollars a month. Rent control those. It would be very, very difficult to retrofit these buildings so that normal people could live. So they're usable. Yeah, I was going to say, it's the greatest thing to do to normal people, yeah. Maybe we use them as, like, prisons or something. Oh, it's like the Four Seasons when MBS did that. Whatever. That's inhumane. I don't think it's ethical to turn a sort of like respectable, honorable, ordinary criminal into Bill Ackman, you know? You just filmed the next Judge Dredd movie in there. They just have like another sky tower to go into. That's how we punish the billionaires when we finally take power. We make them live in the condos they own. We will make no apologies for the terror, but it's just you can't get DoorDash. We will make no apologies for the making you live in your own apartment. Oh, my God. Imagine that, baby. Like, you get, like, an Uber Eats or something, and you just want it at your penthouse. It's going to take half an hour. Like, your burger is going to be so cool. Yeah, it says meat at lobby. All right. Time to put on the adventure clothes. I'm lacing on the hiking boots. Yeah. So basically a lot of these towers, what they did fundamentally in the end, like where the situation is now, is create like a severe oversupply of some of the most expensive condos in the world because it's such a tiny market that you're aiming for. And these people can afford to be incredibly choosy. So like Park 432 sold out 90% when it opened, which was really high. but there have been other buildings we'll get into towards the end where like the sale rate has been a fucking disaster and like none of like right now building one of these things is almost like a surefire way to lose money which is which is the good news uh the bad news is of course next slide please is for everybody else who lives in new york city uh so this is it there are many many reasons that locals hate these buildings but one of the big ones is they literally they act like a giant sundial. They throw actual shade across the city because they're so high. This is one of them. You can see the sun move, you know, move. And this is where shade starts. So like you can, you can be sitting in Central Park enjoying the sunshine. And then all of a sudden you are literally in the shade of one of these gigantic billionaire towers for like an hour or something because it's just a giant sundial. It takes away the sun. It's Mr. Burns' hours. I'm going to say this. New York City is a disgusting swamp-ass city. It's 90 degrees out for eight months of the year. If I'm sitting in the sheep meadow here, I want that shade. Give me that shade. Our new plan, roof New York City. We can get, like, one of the roofers unions in on this as well. We can get some nice sort of like DSA style art of Manhattan with a big e-bind over it. Oh, this could be our office. Buckminster Fuller already had that idea to build a geodesic dome over Manhattan. No, no. He said it would pay for itself in snow removal costs in only 10 years. Sure, man. You got to do it like T-Mobile Park where you can like roll it off on like the three nice days a year. Yeah, understand why we don't buy one of these instead of New York. Yeah. Covering Albany because you've, like, pulled the roof off New York. If you're for the day. I'm pulling it back. Everyone behave down there. Yeah, I just want to put myself down as pro-shade. I mean, you presumably could put it, like, in a big roll, like one of those things you put on the outside of camper van to create, like, a little shaded area in the sun. So you just, like, create, like, a giant tube on the side. on staten island or something i mean they're not using that for anything good so like we'll do it like that and obviously of course like the main thing is it's the grotesque inequality thing you have to look at oh yeah these quite ugly horrible places where the worst people in the world live you know you know try to build a tower towards god and and you know they can't spit on you because they can't open the window but they would if they could and of course none of none of these towers contain any affordable or social housing. None of them. They just, they do not. They do contain servants' quarters, which is fun, but we'll get into that in a moment. Oh, my God. Yeah, and also, like, if you build this high, even, you know, barring the elevator problem, there's very actual few, let me try that again, there's very few actual housing units for the amount of space, you know, on the ground or in the sky that they take up. So they're not exactly like removing the problem of overcrowding in Manhattan or in New York City. There's almost, you know, 80,000 unhoused people currently in New York. So, you know, but they're not getting, for various reasons, they're not getting in here. But current zoning laws for this part of Manhattan do not require that any of these sites have any affordable housing whatsoever. So these are only for the richest people in the world and like their servant class, like designated servant. yeah i mean these these sorts of luxury buildings i mean there's some places where they there are like requirements for affordable housing a lot of times you can get out of that by like paying into some housing trust fund that a lot of cities like to keep on hand the problem is they never do anything with that money so you know i inclusionary zoning i mean that could be a whole episode i mean you know in nice in theory a lot of times it doesn't really work I look forward to our zoning episode in which we all we would actually all have to ourselves the madness rude standing by you get the fucking abundance guys on and you just whine about California for a couple of hours in a row when I signed up for this you did not tell me that I was going to have to talk to Ezra Klein I'm out, I quit I will be taking my stamp of Nova Signature with me. Thank you. That's right. I know for a fact the editor of his podcast listens to this podcast. So, like, the reason these towers can or could, there's been some changes now, be built so high is due to some workarounds and, like, legal things to do with building in Manhattan. And that's because some of the interior of these towers is not actually apartments. They are what is technically or legally statutorily known as a mechanical void, where instead of more apartments, you just have like a giant floor of nothing. Next slide, please. So this is a representation of a mechanical void that's actually in use in New York City. This is a tower block on West 66th Street, which is a modest development by luxury standards. You can get in there for like $7, $8 million for the small apartment. So, you know, not that bad. And the blue area you see on the right-hand side is the proposed or the built, I think this is built now, but I could be wrong, mechanical void. So these have been banned since May 2019 by the New York City Council. But a lot of these billionaire needle towers were built in the time where this is still allowed. So this is how it worked before 2019. So city regulations cap the number of floors any building can have, which depends a lot on the location as well as the size of, like, the ground block. But before 2019, it didn't set a limit on the height of any particular floor. And mechanical floors, where they put the HVAC, where they put stuff for the elevators, pumps, all that kind of jazz these are exempt from counting as floor area under zoning laws so what you do if you want to build a super high tower but not like you know go over other limits is you just put the hvac in one floor that you just make five times the size of a normal floor so you have to like this incredible like empty space in the middle of the building where just like the hvac pumps live because you can make that four floors high or something um without transgressing technically any of the rules. There was one proposed building. I don't know if that was built or not. I think that was a proposal that got scuppered, but they were going to have a mechanical void of 161 meters tall. That's 161 feet, so 50 meters tall. You could fit the building of Grand Central Station in there comfortably with room to spare, and it would just be empty space so the apartments above with more view, you could sell for more money. I'm going to say Grand Central Station is the subway station. The building is Grand Central Terminal. Thank you. So like one planner, when the New York Times, you know, talked to people about this particular sort of loophole, they said that like the max you would need for an actual mechanical void, because it is a real thing that buildings do actually need, including Park 432, that like, the maximum level you would need for like all the machinery or the pipe works, et cetera, would be like about 15 feet. Yeah. So about five meters max. It's like, you know, you're talking like stuff like big pumps. You're talking like recirculating chilled water, all that sort of stuff. These machines are big. They're not that big. Right. Even like if you have, I don't know, some of the stupid advanced new mechanical systems, you know, super energy efficient stuff. you know, which does have to be bigger a lot of the times. Nah, 15 feet's going to be fine. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, 161 feet, possibly a bit much. I mean, again, I'm not sure whether or not that one was actually built, but there are, like, ones that are 40 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet high, just empty, just empty space, just to raise the floor on the expensive apartments that you actually want to sell above. It's just lunacy that they allowed this. There are two other things. These are, I think, a bit more well-known. Next slide, please. Yeah, so this is transferable development rights. These are also known as air rights. If the building next to you hasn't maxed out on its number of floors, you can sell your extra floors, put them on top of the neighboring building, and then they can build higher because collectively you are – What? You're like a carbon-creddit. There's no reason for this I put on the next slide. And the other thing, this is the floor-to-area ratio. This is if you have a bigger floor, a bigger footprint, then you can build less buildings. If you only use half the footprint, you can build more floors on top. So one of the reasons that, like, Park 432 has a ratio of 15 to 1 in terms of height versus floor is because that allows it legally also to be much taller than anything else. that allows it to go so high up in the sky. So this is okay. Floor area ratio regulations are sort of what replaced the old regulations that made you step back on every floor. This is less prescriptive than that, which means that, you know, rather than having a nice old Art Deco building, I can have a plaza and then build, you know, the Seagram's building, right? Yeah. Anyway, speaking of air rights, next slide. So air rights, how did this happen, right? This sort of goes back to the cause of all problems in the world, the Penn Central Railroad. Made it for them number one. Yeah. So everyone remembers the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the early 60s, they decided, you know, we don't need this ratty old Penn Station anymore. We'll demolish it and put up beautiful Madison Square Garden. Fuck you. And that was, of course, an architectural landmark everyone immediately loved. No, that didn't happen, right? You know, they tore the thing down. Everyone got really mad. That led to all this outcry. Eventually, I'm simplifying this a lot, but led to a lot of outcry in the creation of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission so that no one could do something like that again. Right? And all he had to do was watch the rags play. Yeah. So the Pennsylvania Railroad merged with the New York Central Railroad suddenly found themselves with another ratty old trade station that they wanted off their books. Grand Central Terminal. Right? The problem is Grand Central Terminal was now landmarked, whatever the hell that meant, right? So the first plan they come up with is the big hyperbolide tower. This is an IMP. Is it IMP or IMP? I forget. IMP. Excuse me. IMP. My brain's not working. I should have had that immediately. Anyway, this was going to be 2,000 feet tall. It was going to be the tallest building in the world, so on and so forth. Of course, you completely level the head house, right? this was actually proposed in I think 54 prior to the landmark commission it just never got off the ground it's a real shame you know you had a real chance to install you know on top of there and then you know Mamdani would never have been mayor in that circumstance I hate to say it is actually a pretty good looking building but so this didn't happen Grand Central Terminal was still around. So the railroad has to, you know, they're like, we're still going to try and figure out how we maximize the value of this downtown real estate, which is currently a useless train station. Right. The second proposal was 175 Park Avenue here, which is just, OK, we're going to jam a big box, the office tower on top of Grand Central Terminal. Right. And we're going to have the foundations go straight through the front of it. So I think this mostly preserved the main hall. A lot of the other space is gone, right? And the Landmarks Preservation Commission took one look at this plan and said, fuck you. And the railroad said, well, fuck you too. And they sued the city, right? This case was Penn Central Transportation Company versus New York City. It goes right up the Supreme Court. It centers around this basic issue, right? Is the designation of a building as historic, thereby preventing modifications by private owners, considered a taking under the Fifth Amendment, right? or what that means is, okay, should the railroad be financially compensated for the loss of the use of their air rights? I mean, a six-to-three split decision, they came back and said, well, we don't care, but it does have to have separate bathrooms, and they didn't explain themselves anymore. So this was back when the Supreme Court was more liberal, and they come through and they say, nah. Nah, you don't have to do shit. So historic reservation was saved. But this idea of transferable air rights sort of sticks around. People look at it and say, that's not such a bad idea. So eventually they throw the railroad a bone and say, yeah, you can sell those air rights to someone else because you can't use them. so they can then use them to build a bigger building somewhere else, right? Yeah, like carbon credits, as Victoria says. Yeah, exactly. Usually this is restricted to adjacent parcels of land, which did screw over the Penn Central because Grand Central Terminal is entirely surrounded by a road, and therefore there are no adjacent parcels. Car culture wins again. Yeah. It's not shit, Pencestral. But outside of this particular spot, this has been very useful for these pencil towers, right? I want to say there is a good graphic of this, I think, in New York Times a while back. I couldn't find it. But one of the big ones, I think 157, they strung together a chain of historic buildings several dozen lots long to allow them to build it to the final height of 1,004 feet. They just did like weird swaps of properties. So the property lines changed around and they touched like a dozen historic buildings, just barely. It's like, yep, that's an adjacent parcel. We gerrymandered a skyscraper. Fuck you. So, yeah, and it's interesting. This system doesn't really exist outside of New York City, to my knowledge. I do not believe we have it in Philadelphia. I can't speak for everywhere because these laws are all very local. There's no national historic preservation law that has teeth. I mean, we have a national register of historic places, but that doesn't mean anything. If you have a national register building, you can just tear that down. It's fine. It doesn't matter as long as you don't use government money. In Seattle, our tallest skyscrapers, because Seattle is so hilly, they just built it wide enough that it's got three floors of ground-level retail, which they then daisy-chained the bonus for height for each floor of retail. So they got to add, like, 30 extra stories on it versus what, like, Seattle was actually allowing at the time as maximum. Oh, shit. And they were like, oh, cool, we're just going to build this all the way up. And then the FAA was like, guys, what the fuck? We have planes right here. and that's the that's the functional limit because of the landing path for ctac i would just make a big hole in the building the planes can fly through yeah just slide like a business card across the table that says mcdonald's douglas and they're like okay okay i think every airport should be like kai tech uh pre the demolition of um the Kowloon-Walled City, where you get to, like, look at people's, if you like, kitchens as you land, but, you know. That's just because I'm progressive. I'm all about that abundance mindset. I digress. I like fun, regulatory nonsense like this. I think it's fun. Makes you get inventive with it, you know? I know, right? Make them work for it. Do some weird shit. So, yeah, that's what I got on that. Yeah. So anyway, in short, like we have now this series of needle towers in New York City. They're all new built. They are a market of the worst people in the world. They ruin the skyline. They create shadows. They don't build affordable housing. They're only possible for a reason like that for some reason. Architectural and regulatory loopholes. And, you know, they do not in any way, shape or form house, you know, people in some of the most congested and densely populated cities in the world with sky high demand. and, you know, as I say again, 80,000 unhoused people. And let's see how that goes. Yeah, so just tell you how you've got us, like, all sympathizing for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just like that painting. It's there for another good reason. Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, sure. Also, we're, like, 19 minutes in, and we're just going to start talking about the building, so this is going pretty well. Yeah, well, there's your problem, dickheads. It never ends. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes through making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that back to the show you got you got me thinking you got me thinking about one thing are these actually all new build because i think there might be an exception but that's only if a certain building that i um what mccall it uh where are we it's in lower manhattan i found it uh shit i'm not sure if it's a residential conversion yet though uh 70 pine in lower manhattan one of the older office towers which yeah has is now a residential conversion i bet that is now retroactively a pencil tower um this thing does look like it fucks though yeah no it's a good building but it is very narrow and Very tall. That is, yeah, but that's quite cool. I like that. That's pretty sick. Yeah, guess what? We make the rules. You don't. Fuck you. Okay, so we got one retroactive pencil tower. Yeah. Anyway, next slide, please. So we are finally on the object of today's podcast. Yes. This is 432 Park Avenue. Just some general statistics so you get the gist of it. It was built on the site of the old Drake Hotel, The site was sold to the developers for about $660 million in current dollar value. It moves through this incredibly complicated financial history due to the financial crash 2008. I got very sidetracked, and I had to delete all those slides because we would never not be here anymore otherwise. I will only mention in passing the financial interest of one Paul Manafort, who at one time owned part of the site because he got some funding from a Russian oligarch called Dmitry Fyotash, who is an alleged Russian-organized crime boss, and he got the money through embezzling more money from Ukrainian natural gas extraction. So, you know, New York real estate really is quite something when it comes to money. When it opens... It's nice to know, as I'm sort of, like, imprisoned in my kind of sky hell that it was sort of like funded maximally unethically. We'll also say – They're going to sell it towards these fucking animals. Yeah. Drake Hotel was a nice old-fashioned hotel building. I mean, those are sort of a dime a dozen in New York City, at least the buildings. But it was an issue in that they did demolish a hotel for this, which is a problem because hotels are illegal to build in New York City. What? Can I elaborate on that? hotels are illegal to build in New York City. Oh, that's right. You can't build a hotel in New York City. It doesn't pencil out. It is effectively illegal. I'm not sure of the specifics. You can't build a hotel in New York City. I hate that fucking question. You challenge for the listener. Build a hotel in New York City. yeah so when 432 Park opens it was at the time the third tallest building in the United States and the tallest residential building in the world it's since been superseded by two of its neighbours Central Park Tower and 111 West 87th Street which are as you have seen or if you remember the skyline they're basically neighbours of the 106 apartments available About 40 are known as accessory suites, and they are meant to house your accessories, your nannies, personal assistants, personal chefs, you know, people that you want to have around, but you don't want to see. These are the servants' quarters. These are, of course, housed on the lowest floors because the upper floors are for the real people, where the real people live. The median unit sells at somewhere between $11 to $90 million. It achieves a 90% sale rate, which is pretty impressive, and about $900 million in profit for the developers when it went on sale. In 2021, the penthouse went up for sale for almost $170 million and, you know, was last sold in 2025 for just $61. So, you know, your real estate doesn't always go up in value because people just simply don't want it. Damn, that's like a Hyundai Ioniq 5 depreciation. Yes. I think I dropped there, but hopefully my stream is still. It really is the carbon. It's like genuinely this is like the carbon credits of buildings. It has 84 numbered stories and is segmented into 12-story blocks followed by a double-story open space, which allows wind gusts to pass through the building because otherwise you'd have big wind problems. We'll get into that in a moment. And it also has, as best you can manage with concrete, a pure white lattice exterior of port-in-place concrete where the exteriors are made of Portland cement. That will be quite important later for, you know, how it's going now. We have to briefly talk about the architect. Next slide, please. What the fuck are these things? These look like Cities Skylines, like, achievement buildings. I'm so happy to see you. This is my Mazda 3. This is really going to put my kind of southwestern, like, growing city on the map, I feel. And I know one of these is the walkie-talkie, the one that has a death ray, the melted cars. Death ray, yeah. So on the left, you see the architect, Rafael Fignoli. He's one of those, he's one of the big-time architects, like Zaha Hadid. Like, if you want to make a big fuck-off statement building that shows how rich you are, how cool you are, you get him, or you got him. He's since died, but, you know, he's one of those guys. Well, so is Zaha Hadid. Much like Zaha Hadid, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think his job agrees to hire lots of slaves in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Well, his son, I think, took over his architectural bureau or practice. So, you know, the name certainly lives on. Weirdly enough, he's originally trained as a classical pianist, and later in life, when he had a lot of money, he built what he called a piano house on his own compound to house his nine classical pianos. I don't want to hear a single person have a pocket-watching podcast ever again. I don't have a fucking piano house. You should be getting mad at, like, two dozen architects. Why would you... Who do you hire to build a piano house? He hired himself. No, you get Renzo. You get Renzo Piano to do that. Come on. It's his name. You know, sometimes, you know, it's like a lawyer representing himself, you know? But I have to have someone to store all of my Saarinen's. So, yeah, like November was saying, he also did the book of talking in London. Who will I hire to store all of my mediocre Australian lagers? yeah this is the foster's building of my compact so yeah like like i've ever been saying he also did the walkie talkie in london and the vidara resort in las vegas both of which have one thing in common is they both love to focus sunlight on very small batches um the walkie talkie would be quite famous for it uh the las Vegas one apparently for a while was hot enough to singe hair and melt plastic cups in the hotel pool which is that may have just been normal Las Vegas heat yeah how could they tell the London one I remember because it melted cars it like not into like a puddle right but it would like burn off the paint on the bonnet or whatever and because if you're parking a car in central London you are also a rich psycho who you should be getting mad at for making too much money instead of me And so you would be able to go to the papers and get mad at the architect. Yeah. I was reading an article about this on NBC. I'll just read you one quote from it. I said to the staff, I don't know if you know what's going on out there, but I was being burned. And they're like, yeah, we know. We call it the death ray. That's beautiful customer service. I see you've experienced our torture device. We have a cute name for it. I see you've said well there's your problem live show yeah we know we call it the death ray maybe we should make some alterations through the global headquarters so we'll have a focusable death ray big magnifying glass extending arm one Archimedes place so let's talk a little bit about the initial design because that is quite important. So the developer, a guy called Harry Macklow, wanted what he called a statement building. So he wanted a big building. And he commissioned Finoli to make it work. So the demand was for a perfectly rectilinear building that was both super tall and super skinny. It has a ratio of 15 to 1. So it's 15 high for everyone across, basically. The Empire State Building, just by comparison, only has a 3-to-1 ratio, and that's because it's an older building, so it has a flared base, and it steps up rather than going straight. Gotcha, gotcha. This thing, not safely insertable. I was going to say, yeah, we did it. So all this results in a building that is 93.5 feet wide and long. It's a fine building, but, like, why did you put the tuned mass damper in such a way that there's a sort of noticeable bulge about like a third of the way up from the base. Don't worry. If you don't get that one, don't worry about it. It is almost but not quite 1,400 feet high. It tops out at 1,396. And it's a perfectly square design that is mirrored in the square windows and the cast concrete white exterior. It's all supposed to be straight, clean lines, white. You know, this is also why it has a completely flat roof, which will also become important. Yeah. Vignoli said that this was inspired by a trash can, which if I was paying $100 million for an apartment, I would not want to say that I lived in the apartment building inspired by a trash can. But go off, I guess. Well, it's confusing what rich people like. I sure as brother having worked on rich people buildings before I don understand it I mean the trash will become a feature of some of the many problems to do with this building Oh the trash is my favorite problem Me forgetting the names of my podcasts. No, I genuinely, we'll get to it. But the trash solution in this building is my favorite thing about it by far. Yeah. This is, next slide, please. Join me, Mr. Chapo, in the retail cube. It's mostly your sort of standard-ish skyscraper build. It's got a 30-foot reinforced concrete core with 30-inch walls that house the elevator shafts, mechanical services, et cetera, which is surrounded by open floor apartments and an exoskeleton, which is connected to the inner tube by five outbriggers that you can see on the right. Those are like open floors and they connect the skeleton firmly to the inner core, which houses the elevators, et cetera. This is what the exoskeleton – sorry, so the skeleton looks like. Next slide, please. There. So this is the exterior, the facade of Park 432, which unlike like a normal skyscraper, where like you sort of, for the bit that you see, the bit that's like, you know, the decorative part that people gaze upon, that's sort of like bolted to the outside and it's not really structural. It's just put on the outside of the metal frame. With this one, the frame, like the facade is the part of the structure. The building cannot stand without the exterior. It is an integral part. The facade is structure, and the structure is the facade. So it's the same thing. Sounds like Marshall McLuhan. Presumably they actually presented this drawing somewhere with all this fucking Z fighting. Oh, my God. Yes, yes. I signed off on this? Yeah, you did. When's my professional engineer something I can look at? So, like, if this, like, the outside bit, like I say, because the facade is structural, or were to start, I don't know, developing cracks or something, that might be bad, but, you know, this is simply a device known as foreshadowing. The idea is that the exterior is, but, like, it's not connected to your apartment directly, what you can see on the right-hand side, is because if the exterior were to be connected, like if your windows were to be, like, completely set into, and if the exterior walls were the facade, you would have, like, too much wind movement. You would experience too much of the building swaying in the wind and moving about. So what they did is they essentially built, like, these steel cages on every floor, on top of the concrete floor, but it is unconnected to the floor above. So, like, your apartment rests only on the concrete floor below, then there's a gap, and then the next floor happens. That's what you can see on the right-hand side. The cage stops, and that's like connecting tubes and whatnot. But your apartment rests only on the concrete floor below you. It's not physically connected to the one above you. That's also to help your apartment not sway around if all the floors were connected. Yeah, this gives you some advantages. Like you've got some space up here. You don't have to air condition as much. you know obviously you need the studs where you can mount the drywall and all that stuff um you know and it prevents like thermal bridging to the outside through these big big concrete members which otherwise you know they'd be bringing the hot and cold in as well as you know the uh the movements from the wind and so on and so forth it'll also cost less to convert it to billionaire prison because the cages are already like pre-installed so at this point we have to spend a little bit of time uh talking about the effects of wind on super tall needle towers uh next slide please is it good is it is it less than expected what i want is that why we're talking about it yes because it's not an issue because it's not a problem it's never been a problem you know aeolus is our friend it's it's fine um yeah so what wind does to all buildings, but specifically to these super tall needle towers, basically the more slender, the taller the building, the more likely it is to be lively. In severe storm weather with gusts of wind up to 100 miles an hour, a tower of 1,000 feet so like a third lower than Park 432 might sway up to 2 feet in either direction. That, as you will imagine, would be noticeable if you lived in it. Oh, wiggly, okay, yes. No, that's the thing outside a car dealership. Yes. It's not that bad, but it's not good. You made Bill Ackman live in the inflatable tube thing outside a car dealership. Stuff won't fall over, but you will get seasick. Yeah. Yeah, you put Bill Ackman in the Wiggler and, you know, that's just the life you live in. So, because 432 Park is twice as tall as any of the other surrounding buildings, you know, apart from it's more taller neighbors now, and New York City is quite close to what we affectionately know as the sea or the ocean, it catches, like, a lot of high winds and high wind speeds. What we affectionately know is the sea or the ocean is accidentally a perfect Trump phrasing. I've never been proud of the water. so wind loading so like these these deformations start to affect windows specifically so like windows and window frames if the width the height ratio is one in five and part four three two is one one in 15 so the effect is very very strong and if you don't control these impacts of wind your building is essentially going to do the deformation dance which isn't good for you or the building you live in. And even at sub-catastrophic levels can impact elevator movements because the shaft is no longer perfectly aligned. And, like, wind tunnels shoot, like, wind forces shoot up through the elevator tunnel. That also stops elevators moving. Ooh, scary. Okay, sure. I live in the Tacoma Narrows Bridge building. Yeah. It can warp the facade. It can deform or crack glazing. It's like moves sliding around like you're on the deck of the Titanic. Just like, oh, no, my million dollar couch. Somebody call my Windows last shotgun guy. And also, like, even at, like, non-catastrophic level of impact on winds, like, these dynamic motions can create, like, real discomfort if you live in these ultra-high-rise hours. Lateral acceleration, vibration, and even the perception of movement is enough to make people seasick or, like, you know, frightful. Now with, like, ultra-processed food, gout is no longer a disease of the rich. So it's good that we still have diseases of the rich. Yeah, yeah. So, like, and especially on the higher floors, even with all the insulation and everything they put in between you and the facade, you can still hear the building, like, creak and groan. And if you're on the 86th floor of your needle tower and the wind is blowing outside, that may or may not be comforting to you. That's really going to interfere with that puppy girls league game. What I'm seeing from this diagram, though, right, which is interesting. I mean, okay, you have actual deformed shape. I assume this is all exaggerated from sheer and flexural deformation here. It does look a lot like when you add sheer and flexural, you know, It's going to move around a lot at the top, but it's basically in one piece, right? What's really going to get you is somewhere, like, I don't know, 10 or 15 stories up where, you know, the whole building is just bending. Yeah. That's like all of the forces are right concentrated there, which is crazy. Yeah, but don't worry. Those are the floors where, you know, the service people live, so don't worry about that too much. Yeah, I guess so. It'll be fine. Like you can get another nanny. Put some trash bags where the window was. Yeah. Our nanny's people, the longest threat in the history of forums. Next slide, please. So you get all of the deformation. You also get this, which is called vortex shedding, which is quite an awesome term, and it specifically affects these very tall buildings. Basically, the taller you build, the more wind impact you have and the more vortex you never want to get into what i think of as like helicopter aerodynamics you know no i mean i don't know what you're talking about nova like helicopters are perfectly safe never never been any an accident with those so like crashing of an experimental secret version of 432 park avenue onto osama bin laden's compound in what they're calling the most ironic revenge so basically when a vortex forms on the side of a building it creates a a suction force the force then generated by this vortex is like it's not so large in of itself that like it can create like a catastrophic motion or anything like that but the problem is um these vortexes form because of prevailing wind directions and you know your building not really going anywhere they form in like well-organized patterns and that rock the building as they move individually side to side but they do that continuously quite a lot because winds do tend to come from one direction or the other so like your your building is constantly moving in the same directions and you need to account for that in your design properly and certainly you know if if the facade is critical to the stability of the building that's really quite important that you you do that and what makes it worse is if you were to say build a statement building with sharp 90 degree rectilinear angles because like... I was going to say, you don't find a lot of like strictly rectangular forms in nature, do you? Not as many as you'd think, no, no. Although, it's quite a front of form. Can you just say a box turtle is a thing? Yeah, I get it. Do you think a box turtle is in the shape of a box? Like in Minecraft? Like in Minecraft? as the boss. It's in the name, Donat. You don't know, also, I don't see as many death rays like naturally occurring, but, you know, one thing, maybe. You know, there's a supernova like every week, come on. I mean, Steve Owen. That's because we were called this supernova. Steve Owen is killed by a gamma ray blast, like a gamma ray blast. He micro-targeted his heart. Yeah. the stingray that was a cover-up that was that was that was coincidental so yeah like a building with like these sharp 90 degree corners will create a greater vortex effect that's like why a lot of a lot of the really tall buildings are not that they're either stepped or they're curved they which allows wind to like more naturally flow past buildings not park 432 they're just thicker you know that that's another option is just make the floor plate bigger and possibly more rigid. The other thing you can do is vary the height of the building, so, like, build steps in it, or you can, like, have different shapes along different compass points. So that monstrosity tower that's now, I think, the highest in the world, that thing in Dubai with all the sort of drum towers that are, like, glued together, part of the reason that's done that way is it's stepped and it's curved because if you bolt like sort of non-squential things together, the wind curves around it and sort of breaks apart because it can't create a vortex essentially. But again, Park 432 is designed specifically to be perfectly rectilinear, so it doesn't have any of these natural protections. What it does have is – next slide, please. Hold on. It has two main defenses, the first being the open drums, that you can see in red on the right-hand side. These are literally two open floors where the wind passes through the building. So instead of just like slamming into it, they do break up this vortex effect, and they allow the wind to pass through the building apart from the central drum. And that stops the sway. It also stops these vortexes from becoming overly intense. The other thing that they have is, we were already talking about it before, is these two-mass dampeners. Big block of concrete. Yeah. On some springs. Yeah. On some springs. Yeah. Well, no, iron hydraulics. Springs aren't enough. You've got to move it actively. So these, Park 432 has two of these on opposite sides of the central column, right on top of the building. You can see it on the right-hand side. On the top, it says tuned mast dampeners. They are on the tallest, like right beneath the penthouses, essentially. As discussed, they are there to counter wind motion and to sort of stop, like to prevent counterforce to the sway of the building, and it should be enough to stop the building from getting blown over in like a mega storm or something like that. So the two tuned mast dampeners in Park 432 are 600 tons each. They consist of mast steel plates. They were ferried up in individual sections and then bolted together on top of the building. And they are attached to the building by springs, I think pistons, I think, in this particular building. I wonder how they did that. If the tower crane was still operational or if they did something I like to call elevator abuse, which is actually fairly common in building renovations, one thing you can do is you sort of – let's say I need to get a big steel member into an upper floor of a building. I don't have a crane. So what do I do? Well, there's a thing in the building that already goes up and down, right? There's an elevator. So you cut out the weight sensors. You put the elevator on, you know, some kind of independent service, and you sling the big steel section underneath the elevator, drive it to the top of the building, and then you just have to open up the doors of the floor below the building and just sort of pull it out somehow. it's not like guantanamo bay but for elevators yeah yeah exactly you you can torture an elevator to get heavy things to the top of a building um just blasting metallica down the shaft to make it go oh exactly i mean it's spreading the stress position so like the drums open to the public like if you're in the penthouse you want to go out for a smoke and you just go down to like the closest one to your floor. That'd be awesome. I'm not sure if you'd actually want to be there. I don't know what the wind speed is up there, but, like, you know. Yeah, I imagine it'd be pretty hard to get that later. Yeah, I feel like there's got to be a lot of that. When it says windproof, it had better be windproof. We're going to push windproof to the limit. You're going to lose your hat. Yeah. I mean, if I'm paying $170 million for the penthouse, I want at least, like, a complimentary Gore-Tex jacket so I don't freeze to death up there. You know, like, that's the minimum. Locking my carabiner or my climbing harness into a hard point on the drum floor and just spooling out a length of cable like an astronaut doing an EVA. So, yeah, these open drum floors, like I say, the main function is for them to let the wind flow through. They're also at these five points there, like where the outriggers, like extra fix the facade exterior to the internal column. And that provides structural rigidity and sort of makes the whole thing go. Apparently, though, like you don't, as regards to the tuned mast dampeners, you don't strictly theoretically need them. the building from the reading i've done the building like shouldn't fall over if if if it if it didn't have them but they do provide a much more like comfortable way of living or any way of living maybe it's got to be strictly for comfort because you want the building to stand up if there's a horrible windstorm which then causes a power outage which it might do um so you can't rely on the tuned mass damper to keep the building up. It has to be just, you know, it's there to provide comfort. It's not there to keep the building up. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, without it, it would be, I mean, and to be fair, there has been some proof because if I understood it correctly, there have been two or three occasions where they've had to repair these tuned mass dampeners and the building didn't fall over while they were doing that. So, you know, all's well, that ends well, I guess. Yeah. I do like how rich people have invented an apartment building that if your power goes out, it gets significantly less comfortable to be in. Like even more so than the power went out. It's like a sort of more expensive version of that. The ride in my condo has gone to ship. Yeah, it's like a more expensive version of that stupid app-connected bed from Amazon. That all stopped working when there was a power outage when US East 1 went down from AWS, and nobody's beds worked anymore, which was an incredible – I can't remember the name of the company now, but it was incredible. Anyway, next slide, please. You can phone into the tuned mass damper and make it actually exacerbate the sway because you want to be on a roller coaster. Doing cool tricks with it like a lowrider. Yeah. so this is the exterior cladding or the facade or you know part of the structure of the building uh this is poured in place because obviously like you can't prefab and then winch it up uh 86 floors um and it's poured in place concrete of this specific uniform shade of off-white almost white that gives the tower its specific you know landmark look uh during construction they poured more than 70,000 cubic yards of concrete and 12,500 tons of rebar were used for the superstructure to keep the whole thing going. So, like I say, it's cast in place. And because you have to pump it up and it has to settle fast, this is a pumpable, self-consolidating mix with very little water in it. That will be relevant later. And according to Structure Magazine, the places you go for this podcast, the idea is you could have access to newly cast horizontal surfaces within five hours of placing. So it would drive you to be quick. I really hope that Structure Magazine has, like, a good review of building show. Yeah, maybe write them. Maybe they can write up, well, there's your problem. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. I mean, I'm profiled in Structure Magazine. you get a get a glossy you know feature in there yeah yeah um to my knowledge um i had to go i i am now like trying to think back to my materials class i was never a concrete guy i always knew the masonry a lot better um none of this is like wrong per se no in terms of how you could put together a building um especially like when you're building a reinforced concrete high-rise A lot of the times, you know, because normally concrete doesn't reach its full strength until 28 days later as the movie goes. Yeah. But in the interim, what you do in order to build the building higher while the concrete is still tearing is you put about one trillion shoring poles on each floor, right, as you build up. and then again 28 days later when all the zombies are dead, you go in and remove them, right? Yeah, I think I have this in a slide later, but I think when they got really efficient with it, they could like pour a whole floor and then three days later put up the next one and three days later put up the next one. So it was a really fast process because of the way this concrete mix was specifically designed for Park 432. Yeah, three days a floor is about average these days, yeah. Yeah, and it also had, like I say, a really low water-to-cement materials ratio, and another thing that they refuse to do is they refuse to mix in fly ash, which creates much more stronger, more stable concrete, but it also causes the concrete to darken and gray, which they didn't want. Yeah, they wanted white concrete specifically. You're alabaster white, right? And not painted, no kind of, like, facade over it, just, like, the concrete itself has to be white. Yes. I want the visual of my house being built on sand. I am, again, rusty on my material science, but fly ash here. Fly ash is like, you know, coal ash from the power plant or something like that. It goes in, it performs much of the same function that, like, volcanic ash performed in Roman concrete just to make it very, very durable for a very, very long time. And mixing in fly ash in concrete is very common. Like, most concrete has it. That's why it's great. Yeah, but if you have... Is it part of just the deal with getting concrete that it's gray? Yes. Or not. You know, like, you can have this. We're going to build this building where it's got a concrete facade that also happens to be structural, and it's the tallest, thinnest building in the entire world. But also, if the concrete's gray, I'll fucking kill you. Yeah. I want my fucking Apple iPhone building. You can also dye the concrete a different color if you want. That's cheating, but that's true. You can do all kinds of shit with ad mixtures. Anyway, building opens. Next slide, please. What was the slump test on this thing? That's what I want to know. Well, so genuinely, in the New York Times article, there's a lot of them going back and forth with their concrete people who presumably – People get into the concrete people. Yeah. Have had a lot of headaches. over this. Yes. Anyway, buildings open, the worst people in the world move in. Some critics love it, some hate it. Like I say, 90% of the apartments get sold. Jennifer Lopez and her boyfriend or husband, A-Rod, move in. I found some apartments currently for sale in the block on Zillow, of all places. They go from 10 million to 55 million. You can move in, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, if you want. The amenities that you get, but you do have subscribe to the Patreon. No, we're already getting our own building. Yeah, but I want a second home in New York so you subscribe to the Patreon. Yeah. We're not zoned for residential use, Roz. No, Center City CMX5, residential use is fine. But what if you call it a watch collection compound and technically it wasn't for permanent habitation? Yeah. No, it can just be for permanent habitation because it's legal. Yeah, but that's less fun. Yeah. We don't have to do illegal things sometimes. Piratical about it. You're only doing illegal things because you want to at this point. So what? What do you care? It's called illegalism, you know? Yeah. Also pay my mail, Roz. So the amenities take up about three full floors. They include a private restaurant. That's what you see on the slide, which is run by a Michelin star chef. there's a fitness center. Why does it look like a Four Seasons at the Fuhrer bunker? Yeah. This is like a nice Marriott, you know. It looks just horrible and pressing. I think I've had my grandmother's wake in there. I think it's very possible. Yeah, there's a billiard room you can enter, an 80-seat movie room, a boardroom you can rent. There's a 75-foot indoor swimming pool. What are the house rules about if the sort of grotesque movement of the building fucks up your billiards game? I think you just get like a free do-over or something. I think the billiards are on the amenity floors, which are at the bottom of the building. So you don't get a do-over. The moment is mostly being applied to the floors where the staff live. Oh, okay. I was hoping when you were saying that it was going to be applied almost exclusively to Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod's apartment. No, no, they're way up top. They're experiencing a different deformation scheme. Actually, they're not anymore. They sold up and took like a $1 or $4 million loss from the apartment because they didn't want to be there anymore. I think I have complaints about my apartment. There's, you know, the usual amenities. These do all come with like a monthly or a yearly cost, including for, like, if you want to have dinner in this horrible restaurant, you do have to, like, pay for your meal. But at least at the beginning, breakfast was included. So you could go and, you know, have, you know, go down and you'll slip as a meal. This is the most appealing thing you've told me about this building. Yes. So I could move in somewhere and they gave me free breakfast. They'd be like, well, you know, 15 million. That's not bad, actually. They give you free breakfast in the Travelodge. Some of the amenities of a higher tier Marriott hotel. Anyway, so like this is part of the third. Next slide, please. This is, it's all going just fantastic. That's just a nice picture I found. Don't worry about it. Next slide, please. This is where we ask the question. Oh, it's black. You've made a mistake here. What you've done is you've applied some photos of small arms fire damage on buildings. This has been standing for, what, 80, 90 years, right? Yeah, it's part of the history. You don't want to just sort of patch that over. That's actually anti-aircraft fire on one of those. Yeah, it's like that bridge, is it, in Mosca? Yeah, in Croatia. over the river no Musa bridges Croatia and I think Bosnia because I know the Croatians did a bunch of war crimes on it and then that's what the poison drinking guy was doing that's why he was in court in the first place oh shit yeah Musa yeah Karadzic yeah Karadzic I think yeah but it's in Bosnia yeah anyway these are all not pictures of the concrete these are pictures of the concrete about nine years after the building was finished sorry just as a technical question are the bars black like in the final presentation because there are some words that are in there that are it doesn't matter if they are like I can just talk about it but, like, just to... Oh, yeah, I... Just so I don't say, as you can see in the picture, there's words written on it. Yeah, no, they're black. Alright, that's fine. It's fine. I mean, it's just about visible, but it's grey on black. I do note that one of them is... So, these two on the left describe themselves as spalled, and I'm used to spalling in the context of armoured combat. I'm used to that being a thing that armour does when it's hit by something from the outside is it like spools on the inside and you get a bunch of like sort of sharp fragments of armor like killing the crew. Yeah, concrete can do that just sort of on its own over a long enough period of time, especially if it has a reinforcing bar. Especially if that bar is corroding or something. You know, but Do not build your main battle tank out of concrete. Not quite concrete. If you build it out of out of concrete, just put in some fly ash. I know your tank will look ugly and grey, but it'll be a lot more functional in the meantime. I wanted my pure white tank to blind the enemy. Layer one of the survivability onion, be seen in such a way that people go, damn, he's got that shit on. The pure rectilinear tank is incredible. This is the cavalry part of the household cavalry. This is part of the new Vatican City Army. Pure white tank with a cross on it. It's a little bit fucked up if the Vatican don't have cavalry anymore. They should maybe bring that back. They probably should have a few tanks, yeah, just in case. Yeah, so spalling, yeah, is like when flakes fall off of the larger body. It's chipping. And, yeah, as we were saying, the most common cause is corrosion of the reinforcing steel bars. when steel corrodes it can expand up to 10 times its volume which stresses the concrete which basically sort of like pings chunks off the side and it's not uncommon for like high rise to lose some material and chips as the building settles like that's an accepted part of like these buildings sort of settling in but maybe not to this scale and maybe not 9 years in like that's bad in general yeah rebar has all kinds of fun trade-offs right i don't know the specific details of construction in here but yeah so you have uh you have your concrete section here and then you have some kind of curve bar that goes around over like this that repeats then you have your your bars that go like this and that in there and this is a cross section right right um he looks kind of like a frog anyway um so but yeah each one of these bars you know it if it gets affected by water in any way which it does um they tend to corrode as they corrode they expand in this really ugly way one of the ways you can avoid that hold on i'm going to switch the color of the pen here to green because that's the color the plastic usually is is you can coat each bar in green plastic i don't know why it's green but it's always green and the interesting thing about that is it will completely protect the rebar from corrosion unless there is like a very slight nick in the plastic in which case it will immediately corrode at like 50 times the rate from that place onwards the Achilles plastic yes so the other thing electrolysis electrolysis you know that sort of stuff I mean the corrosion reaction is funny it does funny things so the other thing you see which is on the top right hand side is called honeycombing this is basically like small gaps in air pockets this happens when the pull hasn't been done exactly right, and the mix doesn't quite fill the space between the rebar and the formwork, like the cast that keeps it in place while it settles. So this is just like a cast that's gone slightly wrong. Again, that's not massively a problem on this scale. You're always going to have a few casts that don't go 100% right. But again, when the facade is structural and all that stuff, it might be a bit more of a problem. uh the last thing i'm gonna have i'll be honest you know if you're being this psycho about the facade i just put some super p in there super plasticizer excuse me which just makes the thing like settle out instantly and no air voids whatsoever self levels all that crap yeah but then like it wouldn't be pure white anymore and then we wouldn't have miscegenation towers anymore and that would just be bad nah this is like just a little bit of something you put in there and it affects the chemistry it'd be fine probably i don't know again it's been a long time since i took material science someone in the comments might go no if you put super p in there it collapsed instantly i don't know i haven't played i haven't played some slump test for the ps3 um anyway the the last thing bottom right you see these are called surface voids they're again uh they're pockmarking in the surface and they are caused by water that's trapped between the surface of mold and the concrete pour, or air bubbles that are trapped in the mix because there wasn't quite enough mortar to fill in the space between the aggregates. So, like, these are just flaws in the pour. And that leads to... I'm noticing that these look very bad. These don't look good. They are. If I was paying $1 billion for the sort of, like, very smooth, very perfect, very white sort of... You know, it kind of looks like travertine. You know, if you were going for that look, it would look great. But I guess they weren't going for that look because they have no taste. But sadly, because instead it looks like – next slide, please. These are facade cracks. These are all different, like, you know, spalling, pop-marking, voids. All of this you can now see on the outside of the building. These are pictures from October 2025, so last month. Normally, normally I appreciate stretch marks. But in this case, I think it kind of detracts from the overall look that's going for. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it looks better with this. I'm going to be honest with you. I think this is a better look. Yeah, this is a better look than a pure white building. Now, the fact that these are all structural problems with the structural concrete is a different issue. so I'm just going to read you a little bit this is from a PDF of the suppliers of the white concrete mix because they were very proud of their efforts as you understand I'm just going to read you a little bit from it white cement reacts more quickly and is temperamental which meant that the construction crews needed to pay careful attention to the quality control process travel in trucks, the raw materials adjusting for the weather etc etc in order to have a very good consistency among the different concrete batches every single time. The rapid construction schedule was an additional challenge with the goal of one floor per week for a total of 90 floors. Thus, the combination of white exterior, the aggressive timeline, and the general requirements of building a superstructure made this one of the most challenging concrete projects that has ever been executed. Oh, it did a bang of job. This is the promo material, mind you, I should just, you know, add. It's not the foreshadowing material. Yeah, just kind of, I got my concrete guys in, and after a lot of kind of like yelling at each other and then me, they put something in the brochure that just says, greater even than the gods? Yeah. Hubris at 432 Park. You know, you got to think about the logistics here. You have a concrete plant somewhere offsite. You know, they mix the concrete there at the plant. They put it in the concrete truck. The concrete truck has a certain time window where they can get to the building. it then needs to be pumped all the way up to the top then you put the concrete in and you know probably you're you're you're doing like i don't know a dozen trucks per floor or something you know so it's got to be consistent over every single truck right you're doing these batches constantly forever um probably more than a dozen and like you can drive trucks into downtown manhattan no problem like there's never any traffic or anything that you could like get jammed in or anything so don't worry about that yeah no no i mean there's again there's a window where you can deliver the concrete and then there's a window afterwards where that's when you have to phone up your buddy and say, hey, do you have a foundation you need pouring somewhere else, like a crappy one? And then after that, of course, you have to go to the designated dump site. Concrete logistics is insane, everything about it. Yeah, and then it's made easier if you just have to, like, pump it up 90 floors. That makes everything, and it has to be this weird shade of white. I wonder if they were pumping it up at that point or if they were bringing it up in a bucket with a tower crane because I think after a certain amount of floors bringing it up with a bucket makes more sense I don't know, I haven't done I did maintenance, not construction So if you're asking yourself at this point well why is any of this a problem apart from the pricks that live inside it? The obvious ones, sure the moon is one of the most strategically valuable places on earth you could drop rocks with the power of dozens of nuclear bombs you made me think about her never ever change god she's so smart that's my president yeah so the reason why it's bad is because if you have a building that's like a couple feet short of 1400 feet tall that means that any concrete chips that like ping off the side of the building has a very long way to travel down before it hits the deck and essentially there's no i did some reading about this right the department of buildings in new york city their power, their sort of legal power about this is they can require you to build plywood sheds over the sidewalks so that, you know, if somebody drops a scaffolding pole or a bucket full of nails or whatever, you don't die. But if what the thing that falls off the building at terminal velocity is is a sort of like chunk of extremely white concrete, there's no shed you can build that's not penetrating through and killing you stone dead lean through you can get taken out by a brick from like four floors up this is not a situation that you're if the concrete is falling it's probably falling off on like pebble sized chunks you're not necessarily going to get you know a big big rock of concrete, for lack of a better word. Yeah, I could tank a big rock of concrete. I could tank a pebble-sized piece of concrete traveling at, like, 45 miles an hour. Yeah, but when it's a big rock of concrete, all of a sudden it's breaking the sound barrier by the time it gets to you. Me standing on the sidewalk outside Park 3432 looking up, screaming, come out, be coward. Just looking up and being like, are those shock diamonds? So I'll read you a little bit from the New York Times. This is from a report that the 432 condo owners commissioned by, like, an engineering consultancy firm when the things started going to shit. The report, quote, details the presence of new cracks, failing patch jobs, and missing chunks of concrete on the exterior of the 6th, 49th, and 54th floors. Loose concrete had to be removed from several areas of the facade, including from very high floors this is a bit more from the same article there are some photos in the New York Times article that have some of the patch jobs on there which are again really ugly and really clash with the sort of like jump off motion vision of the building because they had to use real concrete also you know this is a very expensive fix just because you need the guys trained to work on the outside of buildings like this. A lot of people don't want to do that. You know, I used to do it, and I decided I didn't like it. Granted, much shorter buildings, but, and I was in a mass climber, not a swing stage. But, you know, swing stage is like the window washer, you know, platforms, you know, that are hung from cables as opposed to the mass climber, which has two masts attached to the side of the building, which is usually more for heavy renovation. Anyway, that was... You don't want to be in a fucking bosun's chair on the side of this dodging chunks of concrete falling down on you. No, sometimes I was either the floor guy or the roof guy for the guy in a bosun chair. Preferred being on the ground to being on the roof. I've never seen a bosun chair, though. Just doing it with, like, rope work. just doing like, you know, dangling off the side of the building while the vortex winds. Yeah, fuck it. I don't need shit for this. I can self-belay. You can give me like a long enough length of rope. I've got a butt. Yeah, so you would go over the side in the bosun's chair with a plastic bucket and a chisel. And a trowel. Yeah. And chip off any loose concrete you find. Yeah. And drop it in the bucket. But try not to drop the bucket or the things inside the bucket all the way, you know. No, the bucket is attached to the rope. You can't drop the bucket. Okay, phew. Yeah. Problem solved. Although theoretically you could accidentally tip it out. I don't know. That's why there's someone on the ground to say don't walk in front of the rope. I'll read a little bit more from the New York Times. Anthony Ingrafea, I don't know, I'm sorry, an expert in concrete fractures and a Cornell University engineering professor emeritus who reviewed photos from the inspections, described some of the defects as cosmetic for now, but said that others had the potential to peel off the building and become, quote, concrete hand grenades. Oh, wow. Just like lowering the lighting in your office, like cosmetic. Now. Now. I would not sign off as a licensed engineer in the state of New York that this building will last forever, he said. I would sign a document that says the Empire State Building will last. This building, I doubt it, which is good news for, you know, the ants living below. So what happened here? Next slide, please. So to make sure that this white concrete, which is a genuine engineering problem, was done properly, they made – I've read various sources, various points about this, but they made like 12 20-foot test columns off-site a couple years before the construction started. I think this is a picture of one of those test columns. I think I have it correct. But Engineering News Record has a paywall that I couldn't get around, so I'm a little limited in my resources at the moment. But normally when you test architectural concrete, you just do it once. They made 12 just. usually you're not using the proprietary blend that hasn't been used before usually you're using something that you know is like relatively well established you know because it's uh either you're fine with gray concrete or it's not the facade material um but you know this building has to be special so i guess we gotta we gotta really make sure this thing works um which which it which it It didn't, really, because, like, according to emails obtained as part of several lawsuits that are currently ongoing between the owners and the developers, this, which I read a bunch of, said one representative from the architectural firm, so from the firm Vignoli's firm, Vignoli's firm, quote, this is an embarrassment. It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities. Sorry, let me try that again. It seems to me that the concrete mix has been diluted by the two entities, i.e. the construction company and the developers, who have never done architectural concrete facade before, Lendley's and Mackler's properties. I believe that one of the financier groups is following what their team is telling them. They are going down a dangerous and slippery path that I believe will eventually lead to failure and lawsuits to come. This process of ignoring consultants' recommendations. So apparently… That must be so satisfying to get your you're going to get sued email subpoenaed. I told you. Apparently, these test columns already started showing surface voids more than an inch across and water infiltration in the columns. And all 12 test columns showed cracks after a 12-month period, as it turns out. So they did 12. Why did they fill the columns? if they were like oh this shit's awful you build you build the test no this is perfectly emblematic of the whole thing you build the test to give you the right answer so that you can build the actual thing you want to build and if it doesn't give you the right answer then it's failed its purpose as a test bed but you still build the thing yeah well you know i'll give you i'll give you the answer actually this is um a bit from the the new york times one of the one consulting engineer recommended specifically adding this fly ash to the mix to make the whole thing more durable. But this is from the New York Times. They will not accept fly ash, parentheses, color is too dark, replied Hazy Mina, an engineer who was then a senior associate at one of the builders in a December 2012 email. There were two options. Sylvia and Marcus, a structural engineer consulting on the building, replied, you can have color or you can have cracks. And they chose wisely. Yes. So despite several emails from this guy warning about the instability of the mix, the developer decided to begin pouring two months later anyway. You know, whatever, shut up. Quote again in the New York Times, cracks emerged even at the start of the pouring process, according to the lawsuit. It said that the concrete supplier was still experimenting with design mixes three months after the start of the facade construction and without understanding the cause of the cracks or how to prevent them. So what if we build a super tall needle tower and just kind of went YOLO with it? Yeah, I mean, if the test didn't work, obviously there's something wrong with the mix, so you should start fucking around with it while you build the building, right? That makes a lot of sense to me. That is standard practice. If I had a stamp, I would absolutely sign. No, no, don't do that. That's fucking stupid. Nova has signed off on this. no one stamped anyone who stamped these drawings should have gone to prison listen I don't know why you would do that to me sorry buddy use the restroom I'll be right back it's fine keep going no I need the next like button I don't know if that's the master switch it's fine imagine the next slide yeah we have like five more slides of content and then we're at shake hands with danger this is reaching Everest levels of episode I'm so sorry this is my fault they're like mostly my slides it's fine oh man my dog has given up he gave me like and half hours worth of dirty looks and then fucked off to bed. I'm looking at the cover of Wired magazine, which has a tactical girlfriend on it and the hard left shooters leading a gun culture revolution Oh These these these these I, I really. You, you're. Every day is Friday. You're, you, the, the, the, the has too much money transsexual, and I indict myself here, is a scourge on our community. but when you are the I can drop $2,000 on my special interest at the drop of a hat kind of special interest transsexual and your special interest is rifles and then you allow yourself to be photographed with them, you're going to get us all fucking killed Hey, on the bright side, like that one will kill me first You're probably fine because you don't have any guns there Yeah, no, that's true They'll kill you for other separate worst reasons yeah I don't know I just I find it I find it embarrassing and unreflective and like a lot of sort of left gun culture you know back hey I was uncontroversial in your absence in this I either can or can't stay in damn how do you feel about guns guns are pretty cool yeah they are right they are Yeah, you can shoot bottles and cans off a fence. I've been clear about the sort of bonuses, the benefits of that. You can shoot deer with them. You can, yeah. You have to. I'm not getting pride on these. You're getting pride on them. And that's good eating. Unless it's got CWD, in which case it's bad eating. Yeah, it's bad. It's scary. Your brain implodes, yeah. If you had a gun, you could stop them from pouring this bad concrete. That's true. All right, so the conclusion we've come to is arm the New York City Department of Buildings. Zoran, I am like three handshakes away from having your phone number. Like, we can make this happen together. You need commissars in the Department of Buildings. Yes. Yeah. That's true. That is true. Either that or, you know, the only thing that stops a bad developer with shit concrete is a good developer with shit concrete. They put it in a latex suit. They put it in a latex enclosure. So while the building was going up, let me try that again. So while the building was going up, because everybody could see and the builders and developers were noticing all these cracks, they brought in this series of consultants to fix the problem and help them out because it was obviously not going quite according to plan. And most of them recommended this elastomeric coating, which is the stuff you see above. Yeah, consultants sort of like hurriedly kicking a bottle of Vivershine out of shot of the webcam. What you need is to put this coating on it. Don't worry about it. I would just bring in a really big roll of duct tape. I mean, this probably would have worked. Like, just be like, this is now the Christo building. If you used the normal concrete and put an elastomeric coating on it, that probably would have been fine. Yeah. It would have been white. Everyone would have been happy. Well, you say this. People had to look at the building or, well. Well, yeah. You say this because, quote again the New York Times, but the coating would give the building a glossy sheen that clashed with the developer's vision. As you can see in the slide, it does look quite glossy. Oh, my God. What you have to do, this is because it's fresh. It's a wet look building. It looks matte and garbage in like a few weeks. No, there's a solution for that. Even if you somehow got the glossiest one, you go down to your local hobby shop, you buy up the entire stock of testers dole coat and spray it over the building. Done. Easy. I fixed it. Just a few weeks exposed to like New York City air, you know. Yeah. No, that's not going to stay glossy. Instead, Mr. Maklo, again the main developer, suggested that workers apply a clear coat finish similar to the product he used to patch a yacht he raced in European regattas. He's suggesting that a Manhattan property developer is some kind of idiot philistine. I would never do such a thing, but, you know. so they did essentially settle on like sort of a clear sealant for the concrete uh but rejected the elastomeric stuff that would probably actually uh work and then we turn to the pages of the new york times the severity of the problems with the concrete was beyond concerning it is deplorable and should be embarrassing to anyone associated with the project with even the slightest level of care for quality. David Dodds, then a top executive involved in the construction with Mr. Makler's firm, wrote in the same email thread. Imagine working around this guy being like, can you use the clear coat I use on my yacht? Yeah. I assume yacht racing and, you know, air and water are the same thing, right? Yeah. Someone was definitely at the end of their rope when they signed off on that one. Like they quit the next day. So the other thing that, so that's the problem with like the concrete as the mix. The other thing that they may not have actually solved properly enough was wind. Next slide, please. So this is the cow in the wind tunnel diagram. I remember those early COVID graphics as well. Yeah. so like the concrete mix is definitely part of why the facade is cracking but the question is did the open floors that they put in you know five times and these tune mass dampeners on the upper floor actually solve the wind sway and the twist issue on this perfectly rectilinear building with the flat roof roof with no tapering or you know anything that would structurally work it the answer is probably not it's kind of hard to work it out as we as it stands like I said before it didn't really help that the tuned mast dampeners already needed several repairs in the last few years so they're definitely they are or weren't quite working as supposed to be and you know like I was saying before the perfect rectangle isn't you know known for its aerodynamic properties well it's going to get more aerodynamic as bits of it fall off yeah and the building still sways and turns in the wind but like within tolerances that's kind of normal for a building like this um but once the concrete starts cracking as it twists and sways more and as more concrete fails and chips the more it sways and twists and that so on and so forth this is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself um because like the more stressed the building gets the more cracks it appears the more stress it puts on the mechanical systems until one day probably you know will it fall down probably building fall down Probably not, but will you be able to take an elevator? Maybe not. And, you know, if you can't get to the 86th floor in comfort and style in your elevator, then, you know, what's the point of having this building in the first place? Because the first point of the – You come to the real fun question. How do you demolish a building like that? Oh, that's fine. Don't worry about it. Like, I genuinely, a bunch of, like, in this country, we don't require a demolition plan for a tall building. Like, you just don't need one. If the shard ever needs to come down, no, it doesn't. Yeah, buildings stay up. Shut up. Yeah. Gotta hire some guys from the Middle East for this one. Honestly, though, I mean, I feel like this does, like, you could just convert it to, like, an 86-floor walk-up, and then it might actually be affordable. Think of your calf muscles, though. Like, you would be so fucking ripped, like, after a year of living there. Like, yeah. Inviting your friends over and being like, now I understand. Like, if you come upstairs with me, you're really my best friend, I swear. That's got to be rough on, like, Tinder or something, though. Like, you know, you're like, oh, come home with me. He's just like, here, put all this complimentary pair of mountain boots. Really, really finally get that splendid isolation experience like Warren Zeven sang about. So, like, I mean, what we were saying before, like, lift is problem. Quote, again, the New York Times from 2021. One really long ladder. a management email explained that a high that a high wind condition stopped an elevator and caused a resident to be entrapped on the evening of halloween 2019 for an hour and 25 minutes wind sway this is not what we should be doing to all billionaires but this is a good start yes and it's embarrassing for any organized left movement that in terms of praxis you are getting outdone by helicopters and wind. The left has to get more aerodynamic with it. Well, then we're going to struggle here. Yeah, like a fish swimming. Wind sway can cause the cables in the elevator shaft to slap around, which is what you want when you're in it. And leads to slowdowns or shutdowns, according to an engineer who doesn't want to be named. Because the elevator shafts are so tall If the wind gets in, it just, like, whips like a vortex into the shaft. Oh, what if it was Bill Ackman from Bill Ackman until 01.11? And according to one of the lawsuits filed by some of the owners, the wind doesn't, like, just gust up the elevator shaft. It also gusts up garbage chutes, doorways, and hallways, making, quote, in the New York Post, spooky noises. And apparently the garbage that people throw down the chute, because it falls so far, just sounds like a bomb goes off every time like a fucking bingo. Yeah, that's my favorite thing. Also, I don't believe Bill Ackman tweeted for a couple of days around Halloween 2019. New theory unlocks. But yeah, the straight down garbage chute is easily my favorite thing about this building. Also, if I lived on the top floor, I would have the intrusive thought of hurling myself down the garbage chute to see what would happen. All I can think is you could never have small children in this building. No, absolutely not. No, you just have like the same thing. They also have the intrusive thought of hurling themselves down the garbage chute to see what would happen. No, they'd hurl their brother down the garbage chute. You have fewer brothers. Toddlers are durable. They're not that durable. No, what would happen is what happens in every movie is if you drop down the elevator chute, there's just like a big, you know, linen basket. But because this is 86 floors, there's just a really big linen basket. You're fine. Don't worry about it. My wife has just brought me some like hot spiced apple juice. because I have been podcasting for a long time. I love you so much. This is a wife appreciation podcast. Yes. Yeah. You've been wife-mogged horribly here, I'm afraid. I just... I love my wife. Podcasts. Podcasts. Garbage shoots. Other employees. I also love your wife. Yeah, no, she knows. I've never met her, but, you know, from what I've seen, she seems lovely. Yeah, absolutely. Wonderful camera woman. Yeah. Anyway, there's one more thing we need to talk about a little bit shortly. Next slide, please. And that is water because water damage has been occurring inside the tower as well. So because obviously like the problem with pumping water so high in the sky for people who take, you know, showers and do the dishes and whatnot, is that you need like a shit ton of pressure in the system to get it all the way up. I fire up my power shower on the 89th floor and I'm killed instantly. They can't even get a scratcher up to me. They throw them down the garbage chute. This would be worse for people on lower floors. Oh, you're right because the pressure is still higher. Yes. Yes. I fire up the shower and a massive water hammer explodes the pipe, killing me instantly. I mean, you say lower floors, but if you are above, you know, the fake mechanical void floors, then, you know, what floor are we really talking about? Maybe that's why it needs to be that high, the mechanical void. so like what has happened already is a flange blew on the high pressure feet on the 60th floor and a pipe burst on the 74th floor the first of which caused such severe leaks that a $130,000 rug was damaged which again I don't feel bad about any of the fucking people who live in this thing but yeah the $130,000 For a $130,000, if a rug cost me $130,000, if I stand on it, I better die. I would assume this is the ply pipe because that's going to be pressurized to something ridiculous. I mean, it's possible, yeah. I couldn't find the details. As opposed to the return pipe or the pipe that goes down, you know, that's going to be – Well, I don't know how the water system works because I assume, like every New York City building, it has an old-timey wooden water tower on top. That's not even a joke. That's not even a joke. They still make them. But you can't do that because that would ruin the perfect, you know, square rectilinear look of the building. That's why you've got really high parapet walls. I'm actually going to look at Google Maps right now. And your most expensive rugs, because, like, a rug that's, like, a historical object, you know, an example of the textile arts, whatever, is either kind of, like, literally priceless, like, no one, like, irreplaceable, or, you know, Sotheby's or whatever has auctioned it at, like, you know, millions of dollars or whatever. Fine, sure, whatever, that's evil rich people shit, but I get that in the sense that it's a historical object, right? A $130,000 rug is like, that's just a normal style rug that you're paying too much for because you're rich. Yes, surely. Probably, yeah. I'm going to go insane. Okay, there's no old-timey wooden water tower on top. There's two chillers and sort of an unidentified mechanical space. Cowards. But a lot of new buildings in New York City still get built with old-timey wooden water towers because you don't need a crane to put them together. You just haul them up in the elevator or up the stairs or something, and they form like this protective layer of moss on the inside that actually improves the quality of the water, and they are all made in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Oh, yeah. Fun fact about old-timey wooden water towers. They're not that old-timey. Anyway. Yeah. So the other thing that's a tangent. The other thing that happened was the burst pipe on the 74th floor, and that caused water damage to the point that two of the four residential elevators had to be closed for several weeks, thus, you know, increasing times by several standard hours. What can I assume at this point? uh there's one more thing he says it caused a five hundred thousand dollars in total damage or three rugs yeah yeah well that well this is the part of the thing that like i mean we'll get into the lawsuit in a moment but like these absurdly rich people have absurdly wealthy everything so if there's any water damage that comes through a wall that seeps through a thing if there's any shearing if something cracks then like it's not just like you have to go to ikea and get like a new rug it's you know these people have been thinking about they're like i have to go to ikea by which i mean i have to get one the one non-broken lift down 80 floors drive to ikea get the like malmue rug load it into a car drive the car back load the rug into the lift get the lift 80 floors up get stuck for an hour and a half on the way then put it in the thing that's That's an honesty. Then on Roller, remember that, yuck, you've forgotten the Blahaj, and then you have to go all the way back. Fuck. They're not shopping at Ikea. I like the Jungle Skog better. Right. They're going to, like, you know design within reach and how everything is out of reach there? No, I don't know this, but this sounds apt. No, yeah, design within reach. Everything's really expensive. You can't afford any of that shit. They have a special version of that, which is design outside of reach. which is where you go buy you know $800,000 worth of furniture. I'm developing a conspiracy theory here. What if there's a parallel rich people Ikea? Because like Ingvar Kamprad, as the name suggests, Nazi, major Nazi, right? What if there's a kind of secret Ikea like bunker, right? There's a people Ikea underneath every Ikea. You get like the kind of Ikea Christmas adventurers, you know? And you can go in there and you can buy, like, the Billy bookcase that's actually good. Or whatever. I thought it was all in the room. Yeah, exactly. But you go to the cafe and they serve you one extremely nicely plated meatball. Well, speaking of extremely well plated meatballs, next slide, please. the shirt that finally gets us food the shirt that finally gets us food and it's me doing rich people Ikea and it's that logo it's run by the blue and yellow skull it's called Iki it's called Iki A-E-K-I yeah yeah yeah fuck you I can't more briefly talk about the private restaurant because it is also very funny So, you know, as I said at the start, like, you had to pay for dinner, but at least you got breakfast for free. And in order for, you know, the upkeep, you have to pay, like, yearly costs, like sort of maintenance costs to whatever association runs that stuff. It was a co-op, wasn't it? Yeah, it was a co-op. Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to pay $1,200. At the start when it opened in 2015, you had to pay $1,200 a year in like sort of communal area charges, which included the restaurant. But since 2021, as part of a new requirement by the building management, which I think at that point was still the developers and not yet the people living there, that residents are now mandated. this is not optional, to spend at least $15,000 in the restaurant. Or pay penalties. Weeping as I'm dragged in for my mandatory foie gras. Yeah, because otherwise you have to pay penalties. And, you know, worst of all worlds, the breakfast is no longer free. Oh, fuck you, dude. So genuinely, if you're rich enough, you can live the life that we all want to of torturing rich people in strange sort of squid game ways. Like, you can make them spend $15,000 a year in one restaurant. You can make them live in the kind of wind cell. You can, like, all rich people have the ability to inflict suffering on other slightly less rich people. Like, Elon Musk can make you be around Elon Musk. There's, like, all kinds of options, right? Well, a lot of the buildings around Central Park, especially on Central Park West, are co-ops. And that's where celebrities go to yell at other celebrities about, you know, why won't you let me install a fire pole in my apartment? It's my apartment. I think it's like genuinely legitimately sucks being in the like 0.1 percent, because what that means is you have been enrolled as part of the like cast of like hostile torture porn for the 0.01 percent. Yeah, that's a good question. I could imagine living in one of the older co-op buildings, unlike Central Park West, because I feel like it'd be a little bit more chill. All-money chill is genuinely a different vibe. Because these are all co-ops, as we say, right? I think the question is then, what kind of debauched, awful things do you have to do to get past the co-op board to be able to buy an apartment there? like what do these old fuckers want from you? You are going to have to be jerking off in a coffin or some like real like Yale secret society shit. Yeah, at least like at a bare minimum you're like worshipping the big owl, like there's no fucking way around that Yeah, you gotta be worshipping the owl So yeah, like the fee rise in the first six years was more than 1200% which made everybody furious and also specifically for the restaurant. All the chefs who work in these places, because all of these towers have their own private restaurant, they're all miserable because everyone who comes there has impossible standards because they all eat in three Michelin-style restaurants all the fucking time. These people don't know any better. But at the same time, they don't want to eat at home because if you have that much money, why would you eat at home when you can go to the three Michelin-style restaurant around the corner every night because simply you can. So there's an art. Eating in this sort of Michelin-style restaurant and you're literally, your attitude is, I'm just here so I don't get fined. Pretty much, yeah. So there's an article in the New York Times about this as well, which talked about a restaurant, not in this one, but in a very similar Needle Tower, where there was only one couple, they finished their food at seven and then the place stayed entirely empty because the two other parties simply didn't show, which they can do because the in-house restaurant can't charge for no-shows because obviously you live there, you own the place. This feels, yeah, just like running any place like this because you know there's stuff they probably had to prepare in advance or something. Oh, yeah, you're getting in early for this. It's just rossing and it's going into a locked dumpster. But this is the most efficient system for allocating the resources of the planet possible. And I think this probably does great things to chefs as well, like mentally, to be like, yeah, I'm getting paid a lot, I guess, but probably not as much as I should be to not cook. This is how you get out of the menu situation. Yeah, no, no. The article that I read had like a – again, it was not in Park 432. It was a different one. but the guy there was clearly like i mean he was supremely well trained he'd worked in michelin style restaurants like he was really you know he had a staff and he was at first he was like super keen to be there and i think he just kind of like existed in limbo basically because he's well paid enough and like he can close the restaurant down at you know 10 p.m every night and go home and see his tuck his kids into bed which like as a michelin style chef you never get fucking do that. So like, he was sort of like trapped in this hell of, you know, making these dishes that nobody ended up eating. Nobody wants. Yeah. This is Kafkaesque. Anyway, all of this has of course resulted in, next slide please, a series of lawsuits. Okay, so here's the thing right if we're thinking about this as a kind of pyramid right one percent getting um obscenely tortured in some way 0.01 doing the torturing if you're a service employee of the one percent and i include lawyers in this you can just you can just carve the meat right off the bone you know like i'm looking at this and i'm going yeah i'm representing the co-op board um of the most expensive apartments in the world against the developer and constructor of the most expensive apartments in the world. I'm not too worried about my billing for this one or really anything ever again. Construction law is very lucrative. Yes, it is. One of the most lucrative cases in construction law. It's really like you know how Dickens was always sort of like skewering the British sort of like that, like Chancery Court for like, you know, like settling wills and stuff, because no one involved has any incentive for it to go on anything less than 100 years, like until everyone involved is dead. Very similar mindset here, I think. So this, this lawsuit is, this is the first one. There's another one since. But according to an engineering consulting report filed on behalf of the condo board, at least, there are at least 616 pending or future items to repair as part of what they say are original or construction defects. And the estimated costs just for repair minus damages are just a hair over $239 million. dollars um so you know just like a fifth of the original construction cost essentially so and the funniest thing is to some of them that's pocket change yes yeah yeah but of course these people will never pay they will like you know pay you know a fucking piranha show of lawyers into infinity rather you know and pay it over the odds rather than actually like just spend the money fix a thing be done. This is a common problem in rich people's co-op buildings. They think if they hire enough lawyers the building will get fixed on its own. And also fantastically, at least according to the New York Times, most times boards that run these condos are not able to get insurance to cover the cost of construction defects. So whoever's paying, it's not an insurance company. Somebody's like on the hook for, you know, fixing the rods from God facade, essentially. The other thing that this lawsuit does, or these two lawsuits are doing, of course, and because this is like, there's an insane amount of press about these lawsuits because obviously immediately the developers started leaking that the condo board was full of maniacs and couldn't be trusted, which is probably also true. Yes. And also, all this has done is smear into the papers and in everybody's brain that this is a horrible, crack, dying shithouse of a place where everybody hates each other. So why would you possibly move in? Therefore, all this has done so far is massively depress the price of the condos. Hence, the penthouse going from $169 million to $60 million because nobody wants to live there anymore. It's just incredible. It's incredible. I love the most expensive apartment in the world rapidly becoming not that because they built it bad. Yeah. Anyway, there is an upside to all of this. Next slide, please. You can all go to hell. I hate everyone in this world. You can lose money on your investment. Yeah, yeah. Elements go up as well, down as well as up. so the upside of this is like the condos in this building are worth much less than fur sales i tried to work out how many of them were for sale that's almost impossible basically like you can't because so much is on secondary markets or private listing you can't get an idea of how much of this tower is currently standing empty but the good news is they're not alone uh new york times construction on one seaport in the South Street seaport neighborhood of Manhattan has been stopped in the wake of lawsuits after the tower was found to be leaning. And in Brooklyn, only a handful of humans have been sold in the Brooklyn Tower, the Burris first stupital, which has been plagued by financial drama and also the drama of, you know, ruining yet another neighborhood with more of these ghastly pieces of shit. So yeah, like, it turns out that the market for super expensive needle towers meant exclusively for the worst people in the world is bad. Your clients are supremely litigious and also just horrible, and your terrible design decisions make you liable for flaws and fuck-ups for years to come. But, you know, if you live in New York City, maybe not underneath Park 432, just like for a little... Just walk fast. Walk fast. Yeah. Until they've built that unobtainium shed, you're fine. It does make you think that the worst punishment that you could possibly go out to rich people, aside from all the stuff we're going to do in the near future, is making them live with other rich people. Yeah. That is pretty bad. We just roll this off. The stuff that's going to happen is so much worse. Escape from New York, motherfucker. I mean, this is the thing, right? Genuinely. If we, like, do the cool zone, right, and we get to say, up against the wall, motherfucker, to every rich person, this can be the wall. The wall of 430 Sioux Park Avenue. And then that way you just... No, we're going to cause more spalling. Yeah, you just wait. Yeah. And in the meantime, how was other Ackmans? You know, like, it's fine. Anyway, final slides from my side, please. Anyway, that's been the tale of Park 432. I genuinely and sincerely hope that everybody who lives there is involved in its construction. Apart from just, like, the normal construction workers and, you know, whoever's the fucking janitor around there, I hope you have, like, you know, I hope everybody's fucking miserable. I'll leave the last words to the same resident that we started with all the way at the start. Quote, this is again from the New York Times. The tension in the building has been simmering for years, Mrs. Abramovich said. Everybody hates each other here. Good. I really like rest energy. So, like, honestly, if she wants to have a nice apartment, that's fine. i i gotta say you know another thing i don't think we mentioned but i have this on good authority from someone who worked on the building apparently the fit and finish on everything in there sucked on day one uh just snapping off a door handle you know as i move it moving into my my 160 million dollar penthouse apartment where nothing can possibly go wrong electrical outlet is wobbly you know yeah yeah yeah little stuff you know that is the fun thing though like i mean because this shit i mean in a uk context at least like shitty new builds were always like just kind of for normal people you know barrett homes would famously just like give you you know the paint socket and you know the the fucking bricks that fell off and the fun thing is now everybody gets that treatment yeah i i i hear that too is that like the quality of housing in this country is always bad it's just the expense that varies like it gets really bad on the you know the lower you go obviously but like even at the top apparently still bad so anecdotally you hear about projects that were designed as you know low income and somehow halfway through the financing stopped penciling out. So they were like, well, this is luxury now, so they swap the materials on the countertops and call it a day. So much of what gets built in this country is luxury student housing, and I think so badly. I feel so badly. That's an oxymoron. I know, but imagine you are the sort of, like, child of, like, I don't know, a provincial Chinese official, and it's like, okay, cool, go get an education in somewhere. We've been reliably informed that Leeds is a fantastic place to go to university whatever it is you know and you're going to get sort of like western culture go to Leeds you go to Leeds and they put you in a sort of like new build high-rise that has had all of the building materials and a bunch of the builders stuff just kind of like left in the drywall it's sort of like leaking through every surface and none of the electrical works at all and you think the chinese century can't come soon enough quite frankly and everything uh every possible vengeance must be visited upon the united kingdom and to be honest i agree so yeah i mean yeah britain britain too i mean america too probably yeah i mean what what do you learn from this ultimately um build the building good no one's built a good building since we invented air conditioning you know that was that was the start of everything going downhill you know i i mean so many like new construction buildings are exactly as bad at this they aren't at the like top end of the luxury market they're still pretty bad but it goes to show that you can go to the top end of the luxury market and the building is still bad um yeah i should have kept building them all out of brick you know yeah you should have had you know apartments with cross ventilation you should have you know uh uh big rooms you should have you should have all kinds of stuff uh but no we that's lost technology so i i don't know i guess the moral of the story is are are you a wealthy person who wants an apartment in new york city give it to us Just give us your money. Yeah, exactly. Number one, sign up for the Patreon. I'm really at the Bloomberg tier. Number two, get an apartment in a building that was built before, like, 1939. Yeah. Yeah, what we've learned is that strong buildings create good times, and good times create weak men. What we've learned is put the latex suits on your building. Yeah, yeah, apparently. I mean, that probably would have nipped a lot of these problems in the bud. But I don't know. You know, I guess it really does matter what material it is, specifically if you're looking at the building from the street and it's 1,400 feet high. You know what else the lesson is? The lesson is unlimited war on celebrity architects. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot of those guys who I think turned out very good. Celebrity design prison camp is, I'm okay with that. Just combine Vignodi and Zara Hadid Studios and say, make the world's most luxurious holiday camp, and then we just go from there. I still got a soft spot for Rem Coolhouse because his name is Coolhouse. Yeah, he's the guy. Who do you think I had to build my cool house? Yeah, exactly. So we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Hello, Devin, Justin, November, Liam, and all guests, past, present, and future. I forgot about Victoria, transphobic. Yeah, that's true. Today I write and share with you the story of how I, by pure chance, narrowly escaped gruesome injury while working on a roadway marking crew for my state's Department of Transportation 10 years ago. I worked this job during the summer off of college thinking that one day it would be valuable experience as a then aspiring traffic engineer. Oh, you moron. no i have since recovered from such delusions and now work in the concrete industry i am not personally liable for what happened in the brief interesting as an interesting and educational as some of the work was it was also miserable Hours in the hot sun, working in the middle of the road, painting stop bars and turn arrows at busy intersections. This work involves the use of a specialized piece of equipment we simply called, and quote, semi-colon, the cart, and quote, semi-colon. That didn't transfer right. imagine if you will an awful ice cream cart that instead of tubs of frozen treats featured a propane heated kettle of 400 degree Fahrenheit thermoplastic paint and a hopper of tiny glass beads instead of sprinkles all right i'm already hungry you don't have to sell it to me yeah hand operated cart extrudes this paint onto the road surface while simultaneously depositing glass beads onto the wet paint to make it retro-reflective. Amid our crew of four, I had the honorable task of blowing the paint dry with a leaf blower. I see leaf blower boy indicated on the slide there. Leaf blower pictured here. At the end of one day, we had just finished up at a busy T intersection, diagram attached, and we were packing up the equipment in the back of our enclosed trailer. Picture it here. The truck and trailer were parked in a widened area of the shoulder just past the intersection with the rear ramp door open. Over here. I had just stowed the leaf blower in its place in the trailer when the incident took place. I was stepping down the ramp door, then several seconds passed where I must have blacked out. Because the next thing I remember was being knelt down, screaming obscenities, gawking at the Mitsubishi eclipse that had neatly parked itself into the back of the trailer at over 40 miles an hour. If your Mitsubishi eclipse is cold outside, let it into the back of your trailer. Yeah, it simply wants the thermonuclear ice cream, as do we all. The first co-worker to rush over, after seeing that I was in one piece, proceeded to try and help the occupants of the wrecked car. I watched in a daze as he helped a confused toddler from the back seat, who was thankfully unscathed, and then a very frightened, though also unscathed, cat. Aww. The illustration makes more sense now. I thought that was just a general expression of anxiety. The driver looked to have suffered a broken nose and likely a concussion as well. Somehow the only injuries I received was a painful strike to the elbow from the passenger side mirror and an abrasion on my neck from where the trailer door ampersand pound sign 39 semicolon s spring cable assist caught me as I reflexively threw myself to the ground. Car crash survivor. Getting hit by a car survivor. Yeah. I did, however, spend a good 10 minutes after the accident, pale as a ghost, crying in the truck as I truly contemplated my own mortality for the first time. Yeah, that's not supposed to happen to the leaf blower boy. You're a hero. This is supposed to be a relatively safe job. Apparently, the driver had been bringing his cat to the vet, but he had it loose in the car. That's a wild way. Sure. Why not? Go for it. As he approached the intersection, the cat had crawled down by the pedals, and the driver bent down to fish him out, causing him to veer off into the shoulder and into the back of our trailer, getting deep enough to give the paint cart a good bump. How lucky it is, then, that I was not still in the trailer, or else I may have been laid out on the hood of this guy, ampersand, pound sign, 39, semicolon, Eclipse, pinned against the still quite hot paint cart. I can say I learned at least two things from this experience. Number one, to always remember that safety cones and high-vis gear are never a guarantee of safety when working near traffic. And also, number two, to always ensure that any feline cargo is properly secured for transportation. Can confirm. Despite the first lesson, I continued to work on the paint crew for the rest of the season because I needed the money. as i have been binging your podcast for the past few months i've become ever more grateful for leftist content as entertaining as elucidating as yours and speaking as someone i don't need to read mitsubishi eclipse because i have the marks of mitsubishi eclipse all over my body speaking to someone who was largely ignorant of the gap in their civic and historical education for far too long. Thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is. You were hit by a car. Talking to Americans will legitimately be like, well, I never, until I heard about this DSA thing, I never knew things could be bad in America. And you go, oh, what was your life like beforehand? And it's like, oh, they used to pay me to like scrape the nuclear waste out of reactors by hand. I didn't have healthcare. Yeah, I have the worst summer job in recorded history and almost you know died in a flash of white paint but sure you know your engineering podcast is what has opened my eyes I really don't like attributing that level of importance to us it's like decades of material conditions of the most abject nature and then fucking idiot podcast is the thing that like radicalizes you it's just that's really, really funny. We're very good at propaganda here in America. That's right. So good that no one realizes that it exists. Yeah. Are you saying, Justin, that we serve a useful role in part of a leftist political project? Oh, God. I didn't sign up for that. I don't know. I don't like to, you know, think so highly of myself. But, you know, but if people are like yeah every morning i would clock into work and my boss would shoot me in both kneecaps with a gun listening to your podcast was the first time i ever thought that things might be unfair i don't know what else to take from that oh we used to dream of being shot by a gun Yeah, nice. My boss had a cannon. Now, he used to be a Mitsubishi Outlander, but this was actually more humane. That's incremental reform, you know. Performing a union to get the boss to reduce the caliber of the gun. We're not doing it. we're willing to work with you on this one it's a facilitative union could you drop it down to a 22 Wigism is when you get hit by a cyber truck yeah the arc of the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards you getting hit by a smaller Mitsubishi thank you for cursing me with the knowledge of just how fucked everything is while getting me to laugh about it. The show is great. All of you are great. From Leaf Blower Boy. Thank you, Leaf Blower Boy. Thank you, Leaf Blower Boy. We're sorry. Trying to explain class relations to an American that's like, well, imagine the Mitsubishi. Now, could this Mitsubishi be like a metaphor to anything else in our society? See, the ruling class are like a guy with a cat under his ass, though. Mark's talking about the Captain the Grinch recently. Yeah, and I thought he mentioned it in, you know, Capital Volume 3. That's where all other stuff is that I'm not paying attention to. Yeah, it's a very famous fragment on the feline, I think, if I remember it correctly. That was... There's a far side cartoon where there's a guy in hell, whistling and moving the wheelbarrow amidst all the flames, and one of the devils is talking to the other devil, and he's like, we're just not reaching that guy. That's how I feel as a communist all the time. Well, that was Safety Earth. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Praxiscast. Yeah, listen to my podcast. Listen to Podcasting is Praxis or at Praxiscast on Blue Sky mainly because we just are placeholders on Twitter now. We do the usual stuff. It's more Britain-focused if that's really your, if you really want to get into the depths of that. And it's also essentially whatever happens to come into my brain and what I feel like talking about. It's great. I've been on. We've been on. It's cool. We should have done this up front instead of at the end of three hours, but we'll put a thing in the description. Yes. And on a more personal note, I have been applying for jobs for a while now, and I can't compete with AI written garbage because everybody sends in 5,000 letters a day and it's depressing me. If you live in Switzerland and if you need a researcher or somebody to do shit in communications, my DMs are open. Please, I would like a job because the taxman would also like, you know, his cut. So, you know. Hire Rob. Hire Rob. Hire Rob right now. And also come to the live shows. We can kill two birds with one stone. That brand may be you. I'm driving my Mitsubishi into the live show. Get the celebrity architecture beating. Don't get any random. We're going to wedge a cat firmly under the brake pedal. You know the awful nerd shit that the Proud Boys do where they do some mockery of getting jumped in, but it's like naming breakfast cereals? We're going to make you name celebrity architects. You're going to get the shit kicked out of you You're going to be like Santiago Calatrava. Mies van der Rohe. Louie Kahn. All right, end us. All right, that was a podcast. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.